


Cadet

by foreverhalffull



Category: Cormoran Strike Series - Robert Galbraith, Strike (TV 2017)
Genre: But with a happy ending, F/M, Is this AU?, Post-Lethal White, Robin makes bad decisions, TW Child Trafficking and Abuse (mentioned), angst fest, surprising friendships, weird time skips
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-15
Updated: 2020-09-13
Packaged: 2021-03-05 03:21:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 21
Words: 43,562
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25287475
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/foreverhalffull/pseuds/foreverhalffull
Summary: “I want to enroll in the Police Academy. Cormoran can’t know.”[Essentially taking two things that have been mentioned way too many times for themnotto add up to anything, and combining them in the angstiest way I can imagine.]
Relationships: Ilsa Herbert/Nick Herbert, Robin Ellacott & Cormoran Strike
Comments: 122
Kudos: 53





	1. September 2017

**Author's Note:**

> Hello lovely people! I'm quite new to this fandom and AO3; I just read all of the books in a mad rush at the end of May and then found my way over here! I swore I wouldn't make an account or publish anything, because I didn't think I had the time, but then I started reading comments on every work I read and you seemed like such lovely folks that I started wavering on the making an account thing... and then this fic flew violently into my head with four fully finished scenes in the shower the other day and I knew I had to piece it together.  
> The first couple of scenes may feel a bit strange until we settle into the time frame in which most of the story happens chronologically, but hopefully it isn't too confusing! I'm definitely pantsing this, as per usual, but it's been fun so far, so I hope you enjoy :)

September 2017

Strike was leaning against the gate of Whitechapel Cemetery lighting a cigarette one afternoon when a woman caught his eye. As a detective, and once a lover of women, that wasn’t altogether unusual. But he wasn’t out on surveillance, and it was a romantic interest, rather than a sexual or investigative interest stirred within him. This had not happened in quite a while.

She was tall, and slight in a way that vaguely hinted toward a muscular stature rather than a willowy, birdlike one. The forceful intention with which she was walking was incongruous with the child on her left, decked in camouflage wellies and a yellow raincoat embroidered with bumblebees, who was squealing as she pranced in and out of the puddles on the sidewalk. So incongruous was the picture, in fact (and so impressive that the woman had no splashes or stains on her light grey slacks), that he momentarily thought it was a case of a missing child and a businesswoman walking past her rather than a mother and child walking home from school together.

He had just crossed the street to help the young girl when he noted their hands, clasped together, swinging merrily between them. He had to reason himself out of following them for a couple of blocks (he could, of course, be incredibly covert, so he wasn’t worried of scaring them) just to keep in his heart for a moment that warm flicker of a mother’s love that had so long been buried in his mind. It was brought to the forefront, he supposed, not just by the picture ahead of him but the visit he had just paid to his mother’s guitar-shaped headstone. He had loved swinging hands with Leda as a child, but had always wanted to swing, like young Ilsa Cardy had, from between the hands of two grown-ups. He hadn’t had two grown-ups but tried to make up for it by swinging a young Lucy in circles until they were both dizzy. 

The next (and last) thing he noticed about her was the topknot on her head, which at its outrageous angle could have been something worn by his old flame Ciara Porter on a runway, or by the young girl in her bumblebee raincoat to her crèche, with neither looking out of place. It almost worked with her business slacks and professional heels, as well, but did hint slightly to a career where women stood giggling around the break room kettle. Maybe fashion, or HR. Its golden auburn was just paler than the shade that still haunted him.

He did not notice, before turning away to the other side of the street again, that she had been stealing the smallest of glances in windows and puddles. If he had turned from where he was standing, his back to her as he watched the traffic, he would have seen her full face peeking over her shoulder, no worse for wear despite the time since their last meeting, eclipsed by the few rose gold baby hairs which hadn’t made it into the topknot.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is definitely far shorter than I'd usually make a chapter in an original work, but for some reason Strike doesn't want to linger around in my head too long. They'll probably get longer as we go!


	2. March 17, 2013

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter is set four years before the first one! Sorry about the skips.

March 17, 2013

As an investigator, Vanessa Ekwensi was rarely surprised. Dumbfounded, appalled by the depraved or ridiculous or brazen nature of humanity, sure. But as an effect of seeing all ranges of things in her professional life, little in her personal life was stunning. But things which crossed the boundary of personal and professional, well.

She could never have been prepared for what her good friend, Robin Ellacott, said as she took her out for dinner with the strangest of requests. “I want to enroll in the police academy,” she had said. “Strike can’t know.”

“He’s your boss,” Vanessa said. “How is he not meant to know you’re working a different job 9-5? Or, more accurately, 9-8? It’s long hours, Robin, not something you can do part-time.”

Of course she knew Robin was smarter than that, but the alternative, that she knew what she was getting into and that was exactly why she was getting into it, felt impossible.

“That’s the point. I’m leaving him, and I want to start at the Met, become an investigator there.”

“Leaving him.” Vanessa let the words hang between them, hoping for a hint at whether they held the double entendre she suspected, but was left watching as Robin rolled her eyes toward the ceiling, sipped her water, tapped her fingers on the tabletop. Anything to avoid eye contact. She sighed, knowing her friend wouldn’t give up just because she was unsupportive.

“We have a new class starting the academy week after next. I’m sure I can get you a spot, given your experience, but…” She trailed off and grabbed Robin’s hand from where it had begun to fiddle with the napkins on the table, making it clear that her next point was said as a friend rather than as a future coworker. “He’s an investigator, Rob. You’re not exactly going far, and he’s up at New Scotland Yard at least every other month. He’s going to find out.”

Robin shrugged. “Maybe. But I can either go the rest of my life trying to hide from him, or I can live the rest of my life for myself. And I’ve come too far to give myself up avoiding him. I’ll take it.”

“Okay. I’ll check on it tomorrow and let you know the details, but I’m sure they’ll have a spot for you.”

Robin nodded, and practically mouthed the soundless words. “Thank you.”

Vanessa furrowed her eyebrows. “Are you alright, Robin?”

“I’ll be fine, yeah. Thanks a million, V.”


	3. April 2013

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Robin starts a new job and leaves an old one.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter follows pretty closely after the previous one!

April 2, 2013

The morning of her first day at Hendon Police College, Robin was a nervous wreck. She couldn’t help but think back to her first day working for Strike, glimmering with the promise of love and new beginnings and the sapphire on her fourth finger. Knowing, in a much calmer way, nothing about what lay ahead of her.

Maybe it was because her investigative instincts had been brought to life that day, but she was much more nervous her next first day on a job, more aware of the unknowns ahead of her. She made an extra-strong tea and put two more cups worth, sweetened, in the Tartan flask along with her pocket-sized notepad and a bottle of Zofran in her work bag, resolutely not thinking about the other times she’d brought the flask along on a job.

She was forty-five minutes early and sat alone in the classroom, making lists as she always did when she had too much time and thoughts she didn’t want to process. It helped her to pull some strands from the tangly web of emotions into more cohesive plans and narratives. First, she jotted down all of the things she would need to pack for her upcoming trip to Masham for Jonathan and Emily’s engagement party, which led naturally to potential wedding gifts. (Maybe Martin would be willing to go in together on one?) This led to potential baby gifts for Stephen and Jenny’s daughter, who was due in a few short months. The next list followed naturally as well, but it was one she wished she hadn’t made. She flipped the page over and was writing aggressively on the backside, almost hoping to write a hole through the paper, when DI Roy Carver walked into the room.

There were a couple more students sitting around now, alone and in small groups, so she was moderately surprised when he stopped in front of her. He placed a travel mug down loudly on her tabletop and leaned into her space. “You’re that floozy working for the one-legged underminer, aren’t ya? Did you finally come to your senses and decide to work with a reputable institution, or are you planning to take advantage of our training for him?”

She didn’t owe Roy Carver a cent of information about her personal life, or any of her professional life that didn’t concern him. “He has a leg and a half.” He looked confused, so she explained. “You called him a one-legged underminer. He has a leg and a half.”

“So you agree he’s an underminer then?”

She shrugged, knowing he wasn’t worth arguing with, and he gave her a devilish yellowed smile which he then turned around to the rest of the class.

“Let’s begin, plebes. Hope we’re all here. Today we’ll go easy on ya, bit of an overview of all of our departments here, we’ll get your badges and partner pairings sorted, introduce you to the physical training regimen you’ll have to follow. It’s intense, you can’t all be fat bastards like me.”

That turn of phrase, though nowhere close to resembling her feelings or perception of the man, drew her mind back to someone who’d too often referred to himself that way, and whose bed and office she’d only just left days before. 

March 19, 2013

“What’s this?” Strike looked down at the folded paper she’s set on the conference table between them. Until the building on Denmark Street reopened under the new developer, they were temporarily renting in a coworking space Strike hated.

“It’s my resignation. Effective immediately.”

He looked at her rapidly enough that he had to bring one hand to rub the back of his neck which had twinged, while the other hand picked up the letter. His right eyebrow furrowed in confusion, concern, and a hint of the expression she saw when he was, against his will and better judgment, trying to parse out motive in one of their grizzlier cases. His eyes glanced over her typed words briefly.

“You can’t do this.”

“Two weeks’ notice, then. I didn’t realize you’d be the type of boss to care about that sort of thing.”

“No, that’s just the thing, I’m not your boss. You’d have to make out a resignation letter to both partners in the firm and it would be a conflict of interest to let you handle your own resignation, so, would you look at that? Impossible. You can’t resign.” He was mocking her now, but angrily.

“Well, I just have.”

“You have not. Your resignation was,” he paused to rip the letter in half perpendicular to the direction she’d folded it, so that it landed in two little tents when it fluttered to the floor. “Not. Accepted.”

“I’m leaving, Corm. I’m sorry. I can’t do this anymore.” She picked up her trench coat, the very same one she’d worn on her first day, and which she’d just rediscovered in her packing and unpacking from the Herberts’ house months ago.

“If you walk out of this office Robin, so help me, I will never forgive you.”

It would make things easier, but tore her heart open nonetheless. “You don’t mean that.”

From the unfocused look in his eye, she could tell they were both reliving the same scene, the other time they’d lost one another, when she had said those words to him the first time.

“I do.”

She nodded matter-of-factly, in her best impersonation of someone who wasn’t affected by his words, finished tying up the sash on her coat, and grabbed her work bag. “Goodbye then, Mr. Strike.” 

The door swished shut behind her, and he heard her calling out a farewell to their office neighbor on her way down the corridor to the lifts. That night at their interim afterwork local, chosen for its incredible proximity to the coworking space rather than its pub snacks or atmosphere, he reflected on how quiet her leaving him had been. No screaming matches or flying ashtrays, and in its lack of drama, he knew there was finality. This was nothing like his many separations from Charlotte the Harlot, as Ilsa had begun calling her in light of the rumors surrounding her impending divorce from Jago Ross. They would not be falling back together a million times.

He had never kidded himself that he was lucky in love. In addition to the trauma with Charlotte, there had been Tracey in the Red Caps, who realized on their first leave together that he was only stable and steady in comparison to an investigative career in a warzone. But despite his awareness of his poor luck, or genetic predisposition to ruin romance, he had never thought that a love with Robin would be so short-lived. He had imagined her inherent goodness would balance him out. But only four short months from their first intentional kiss, and already she had left him.

Three pints in, he realized he hadn’t asked her why. He pulled both halves of her letter from his pocket, hoping they would hold the answers.

Dearest Mr. Strike, it began.

I would like to begin by thanking you for everything you have taught me, and every change you have brought about in my person during the years I have spent in your employ. As such, it is with deep sadness and regret that I must inform you that I can no longer continue as your partner. I wish only the best for the firm. Do send my love and good wishes to Hutchins and Barclay.

Sincerely,

Robin Ellacott

Her name was signed with a flourish in her favorite blue fountain pen, which she loved for its smoothness but used only rarely because its ink bled through like a bitch. In reverence of the signature, he folded it neatly back on the table, then in growing frustration jammed it into his pocket. So much for bloody answers.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ahh this one did hurt to write. But I really think JKR is going to hurt us like this sooner or later if she has 7/8/10/? Strike books planned. My goal with this story was honestly somewhat just to hurt myself as badly as possible so that I'm prepared for whatever September brings...


	4. April 2013: Nicknames

April 2, 2013

Unaware that it was her first day at a new job, or of anything about her whereabouts, Cormoran had left her a message in the wee hours of the morning, slurring from drink or sleep, she wasn’t sure. It was on her mind when she met the eyes of her Academy partner for the first time.

“Cadet Ellacott, you’ll be with Cadet Whittaker.”

“Robin, I’m going to get the answers. I’m going to get the answers we need to work it out.”

She hadn’t been able to get his words out of her head. She assumed they related to the only case they had which wasn’t infidelity-related, a cold case that had been nagging at them both but impossible to untangle. She didn’t allow herself to imagine, or hope, that his words bore meaning to their relationship, to working it out between them. Shaking it from her mind to consider after work, when someone else wasn’t paying for her concentration, she looked to her new partner.

“It’s nice to meet you, Cadet Ellacott,” he said.

She reached out to shake his hand, wondering if his cultured accent was the result of his wealthy grandparents’ upbringing or if he’d been to university.

“It’s nice to meet you as well, Switch,” she’d said, mostly just to see his reaction. He did a double take.

“Some kind of investigator, then! I fear I have a bit of catch up to do and it’s only the first day!” His quick, easy laugh surprised her; she had not expected unhidden joy from someone with a life as messily-began as Strike’s.

“Oh, no catch up needed. I knew your brother.”

\------- 

Between Switch’s misplaced indignation that she knew his brother better than he, and her standoffishness out of fear that having another coworker who happened to be Leda Strike’s progeny would be too much for her memories, it took them an entire week of constant contact to extend professional respect into liking one another personally. Their friendship was born mostly out of a shared competitive drive.

The Met, in celebration or nostalgia of the Games London had hosted nine months previously, was hosting a Cadet Olympics. Pairs of partners competed against one another in investigative puzzles, physical exercises, and the occasional dumb game reminiscent of a primary school sports day.

He was spotting her on the pull up bar in the Hendon gym in preparation for the next day’s competition when the topic of nicknames came up. He’d taken to calling her Robespierre on occasion, a teasing hint that she needed to stop making so many unilateral decisions and plans of action. She complained that a nickname couldn’t be longer than your original name.

“Sure it can! It’s not just about building off your original name, it’s also about personality, Robin. Hence, Robespierre.”

“He was a tyrant!” she protested, struggling to get her chin above the bar while simultaneously glaring down at him.

“Well, if the shoe fits…” Trying to dodge her attempts to swat him with her legs, he laughed. “Kidding, kidding! He was also an idealist, you know. A revolutionary!”

She mumbled something Yorkshire which bore a suspicious resemblance to fook you, before saying between labored breaths, “Have you ever heard of Leda and the Swan? The Yeats poem, or from Greek mythology?”

The bar was nearly eight feet in the air, so he had to lower her onto his shoulder in order to give her a long enough break for a conversation. “Don’t tell me I’m a graceful Swan or some shit.”

“What? No. The swan was an evil rapist. Look it up. But her son with the swan was named Polydeuces.”

He met her eyes in the mirror. “Just how well did you know my brother?”

She looked away and grabbed back onto the bar, forcing him to let go of her legs. Sensing her unwillingness to respond, he said, “Fine. But when I said it didn’t have to relate to my name, I didn’t mean go for ancient Greek. Jesus, that’s a mouthful.”

“Well, we’ll give you a nickname for your nickname then. How about deuce?”

“Sounds like douche,” he muttered. 

“Picky, picky! Beggars can’t be choosers, douche!” Her laughing got too intense, so he took her carefully down from the bar.

“I’ve got it! PD, for Polydeuces, like an abbreviation. It sounds a bit like Petey too, that’s right cute.”

“Whatever,” he said, but she saw his smile reflected in the mirror.

That training session having cemented their friendship, Petey and Robs dominated the Cadet Olympics, and at the beginning of June, two-thirds of the way through their 13-week foundational training at the Police College, they moved in together. His lease was up and his roommate had wanted to move in with his girlfriend, so he’d asked Robin if she knew of anyone looking for a roommate. Wary though she was of moving in with a 21-year-old, she was desperate to move out of Louis’s place before Ilsa came knocking, seeking justice for her childhood friend. 

And besides, she’d already found Switch to be dependable, serious but happy. Working with him was perfect in a way that, after walking out of Strike’s temporary office in March, she thought she’d never find again. Not only did he look up to her, and value making decisions together, he was as open a book as she’d ever met. She rarely ever worried over him, which was good, because she had plenty to be concerned about just over her own self. He could nearly read her mind and she, his, making investigating together a breeze, and he walked the line between professional distance and inside jokes perfectly, making it fun.

In addition to dominating the Cadet Olympics, they graduated at the top of the Academy’s class, earning them first dibs on a department with which to spend the two-year probational period which would make up the rest of their training. Having already discussed it, and wanting to remain partners, they both chose the Abuse and Neglect division’s Criminal Investigation Department. 

It wasn’t the life she’d wished for as she kissed Strike at New Years, but given her circumstances, she thought it was better than she could have hoped.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the likely inaccuracies of what Hendon/police training entails! I'm always afraid when I'm researching for a story that the powers that be will get suspicious of my searches, haha.
> 
> And thank you all so much for being so lovely and welcoming me into the fandom! All of your comments warmed my heart.
> 
> Lastly, what do you think of Switch?! I've definitely taken plenty of liberties with his character, but I quite like the idea of him being a foil to Strike in many ways, but similarly supportive of Robin with that good heart Leda passed down.


	5. June 2013: Garden Parties

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Nick and Ilsa may have let our favorite couple down by not meddling enough, but they have a good reason.

June 2013

Curry nights had fizzled out a couple of weeks after Robin left. He had never explicitly told Nick and Ilsa what had happened, and for all Ilsa’s meddling when he was content, she wasn’t one to dig her nose in when she could tell he didn’t want to talk. 

When he showed up two Fridays in a row without her, and without making her apologies, they gathered a fight had occurred, but it wasn’t until the third week when he mentioned promoting one of the sub-contractors to partner, or at least full time, that they realized how serious the separation was. 

They then gradually made different plans each week, to go out to dinner, or a pub, or have a picnic, until their former tradition didn’t painfully scream Robin’s absence. 

It had been a couple of weeks since he’d seen them when he arrived at Octavia Street for their garden party. His mind was on the cold case he suspected he was close to cracking and his upcoming move back to Denmark Street. Before Robin’s departure, they’d considered looking elsewhere for a new office, as his lease had begun when he was a one-man operation and there were now five of them, counting Denise. However, without her sharp brain and manpower he knew he couldn’t keep up the same caseload they’d been averaging and didn’t want to take the risk of committing to a higher rent without higher income to match. That had affected his plans on his attic flat’s lease, and he’d been considering pitching that to Robin, as well. He didn’t understand how he’d read the signs so wrongly.

He shook his head to rid himself of the thought of her, and the action brought Ilsa’s friend, Louis into his sightline. Almost as if he’d conjured Robin’s flatmate with the thought of stealing her away from him, the man began walking towards him. They knew each other well enough from the nights and weekend afternoons he’d spent at their flat. Although surveillance often dragged them in different directions, he had never been very diligent about his spending-consecutive-nights rule with Robin.

“Louis, mate, how’s it going?” Cormoran switched his beer to his left hand, freeing his right to shake Louis’s warmly. 

“Alright, Strike, and yourself?” He shook his head to indicate things were more or less running smoothly (a flat out lie) and asked Louis about his current show in order to keep conversation off his own shitshow of a life. Once that conversation had run its course though, he was at a bit of a loss for words. He and Louis both moved at the same time to pivot conversation to one of their few common grounds.

“How’s Robin, then?” 

Confusion dawned on both of their faces as each realized the other was out of touch with her. “She’s not been in to work?”

“She quit in March,” Strike replied. “She’s moved out?”

“Yeah, just a couple of weeks back. Said she’d found a new place with her partner and I assumed that was you.” Seeing Cormoran’s face, he added, “Oh God, I’ve put my foot in it haven’t I? I should’ve known something had happened when you weren’t there helping her move. I’m horribly sorry, Strike.”

Strike’s first instinct was to question this witness who’d been in Robin’s life months after his last contact, but then the words hit him again. Her partner.

“Yeah, no Louis, it’s fine. Of course, I mean, you didn’t know, and. Yeah. Actually, I see an old school friend over there I don’t get to see often, so I really must go say hello. Great to see you, though.”

A confused, regretful Louis shook his hand again and watched him leave. It was then, whilst walking over to his old friend Grant from Cornwall, that he realized there were a number of Cornish friends there he didn’t see often, and even Ilsa’s parents. That would certainly foil his plans to leave early; if all of these individuals were in attendance then there must be an announcement, and he hoped it was a good one. So, after briefly greeting Grant and his wife, so as not to make Louis think he’d been blown off, he headed back to the bar cart for some whiskey and a beer to wash it down. 

He was still lingering along the garden wall, drinking and avoiding small talk when Nick tapped a knife to his glass and, attention drawn, Ilsa informed the crowd that the party was in celebration that finally, after years of difficulties and disappointments with the process, she and Nick had been approved to adopt a set of siblings, an infant and a four-year-old. Thrilled for his friends, he forced his personal sadnesses to the back of his mind temporarily. He did wish he were slightly less drunk for the occasion, which deserved to be remembered.

Strike swapped his beer for water and had secured a couple of miniature pies from the serving table, hoping to be a little more solid on his foot before joining the long line of well-wishers so that his congratulations would genuinely convey his happiness for his friends rather than cause for concern. 

It was in this desperately sobering state that Ilsa’s mother found him and hugged as much of him as her small body good manage. “Cormoran Strike, it is so lovely to see you! Now, I’d heard you had a lady around these days, is she here tonight?”

“Not anymore, I’m afraid, Mrs. Cardy.” It would have been impossible to feel worse than he already did, having just learned Robin had moved on, but disappointing this sweet woman made him feel worse than he would have expected.

“Oh, what happened Corm?!’

“The usual stuff, I guess, you know.”

“Oh yes, well, the inability or unwillingness to settle would send any girl running. They all want a baby, even the ones who say they don’t. But you’ll find the right one someday my boy, and then you’ll want it, too. Won’t even feel like a conscious decision.”

Cormoran wanted to protest on a million different grounds at once. Not only was her assertion so boldly closed-minded, leaving out any other desire a woman could have, such as for fulfilling work or adventure or control, but she was also far off base in assessing his situation.

“I’m afraid you’ve misunderstood.” He laughed gently so as not to come across as contrarian, which with most people he wouldn’t have minded, but Ilsa’s mum was incredibly sweet and a pathological overthinker, who would have been distraught at upsetting him. 

“I didn’t mean how everyone’s relationships end, just ‘the usual stuff,’ in that it was no unique, novel scenario. We worked together, and when she left the business, she didn’t want to continue the personal relationship. Clean break and all that.” 

He had wondered, for a couple of days, if her leaving him were a false front like the ad he’d put in the paper for a new “Girl Friday” just before her wedding. If Matthew had been causing problems with their financial agreement because he knew of their relationship and wanted to get out of paying alimony, and as such she was pretending to have left him. But when their separation had continued, and when Ilsa had told him during a phone call he suspected she’d known was not about business, that such a thing would usually have not prevented her decree nisi from generating a decree absolute, he’d watched as his only theory evaporated, unreplaced.

Explanations such as the one he’d given Mrs. Cardy were the only ones he had. Entirely absent were any claims of why she’d done it, but then, so were all of his best case conclusions.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> How much swearing is allowed under a teen rating and how much needs a mature? Asking for a friend aka me before I post the next chapter :)


	6. Summer 2013: Nightmares. Kind of.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks so much for all of your advice on the language rating! I myself wouldn't say it in front of a teen, but teens I know would, and most of the characters probably would as well, so I figured I'd stick with teen for now as it's nothing really explicit. Hope everyone's doing alright and that you enjoy this chapter! Very angsty today :)

Summer 2013

In addition to the call on her first day at Hendon, Strike continued to call regularly, often in the middle of the night, to pore over case details in three-minute increments until her voicemail cut him off. She never answered, and he seemed not to expect her to, but rather just to need someone to work things out with.

He had never needed it before, having run the business (though not near as successfully) before her arrival, and having pieced together many of their early cases, although dependent often on her evidence and surveillance, on his own without her as a sounding board to put the pieces together. But it seemed almost more important to talk to her answerphone now that he didn’t have her physical presence in the office, or her perfume wafting through the air. 

That was something he missed both in the office and his attic. Having moved back to Denmark Street, where she had belonged more than either of them had in that awful, garishly neon coworking space, the absence of her coat on the peg and threads of spun-gold hair on his spare pillowcase felt more tangible. He had taken to using her I ❤️ Yorkshire mug rather than his own Cornwall one it had been bought to match.

He hated himself for missing these things, as she seemingly didn’t have a reciprocal need. More than that, he hated it because he’d prided himself on not needing others. Throughout his and Lucy’s childhood, he had needed to be there for others – it was why he hadn’t moved full-time to Cornwall when his sister had, and why he’d not left for Oxford until he was confident of Shanker’s care for his mother – but he had managed the whole, unstable 18-year affair without ever depending on someone’s constant presence. How could he now be changed by someone he’d only been allowed to love for four short, heady, perfect months (though in reality, his feelings had been there much longer)?

He tried to extend this hate to her, thinking it would make it easier, but it only managed to birth a bitterness that unraveled all the change Robin had brought about in him. This thought reminded him of a line from her resignation letter, and he tried a bit harder to hate her.

Though she never answered, Robin lived for his calls and listened religiously to the voicemails he left, often multiple times each. She enjoyed them even as gradually, the names she knew and evidence she’d collected were replaced by new characters and cases. 

It was in both of their best interest that he didn’t, but she harbored the small hope that his continual including her hinted at later reconciliation. She’d known all along that she couldn’t hide forever, especially given that she wasn’t going far, but figured that if he found her and wanted to stay, that would be his own decision rather than one she thrust upon him. 

This hope was dashed in July, when she saw a picture of Strike on a tabloid in the grocery store till area. He was in a park somewhere with the wretched Charlotte Campbell (née Charlotte Campbell-Ross), a double pram with only one chubby infant inside. The other was crawling along the grass between them, pulling itself up on his intact shin.

Strike was uncharacteristically smiling down at its ugly, impossibly flat-backed head that was probably a sign of its neglectful mother not picking him up enough.

She knew her thoughts were rash and ugly, but the picture hurt undeniably more given everything that had happened. Feeling a familiar dash of regret, but mixed with a new uncertainty about whether her bad decision had been the right one, she rested her hand on her stomach, which was now almost large enough to set snacks on as she and Switch watched Poirot (the pregnancy milestone he was most excited about, bless him).

Hearing her sigh, he looked over from where he was bagging their groceries at the self-serve till and reached out to grasp her hand.

“Alright, Robs?”

She shrugged. “I know I gave away my say, but it hurts he went back to her.”

“He’s an idiot. You’re leagues ahead, any day.” The woman behind them in line was getting impatient, so he went back to scanning and bagging their items whilst she talked.

“That’s just the thing though, Petey, is he’s not an idiot. He didn’t choose her over me because I made the choice for him. I’m the idiot, especially if I took everything he said to mean one thing, acted on that assumption, and there he is off canoodling her ugly babies. I’m the idiot.”

“You’re a strong woman, Robs, not an idiot. I’ve seen you at work, and your instincts are good. Yeah, maybe you could have been happier another way, but maybe not. You were acting out of integrity and on the information you had – now, I’d be inclined, as your partner with lots of experience benefitting from your foresight, to guess you acted properly, but the problem with decisive, unilateral decisions, Miss Robespierre, is that you only ever know the outcome of the option you chose. You made your bed, now lie in it and trust yourself.”

\-------------------------------

Her nightmare that night had nothing on gorilla masks and the Laing stabbing, but was instead a retelling of a once-happy moment which was now ranked somewhere around the fourth-most-disappointing of her life. 

She and Strike didn’t celebrate the over-commercialized Valentine’s holiday, as each had less-than-favourable (and for him, borderline traumatic) memories of the day with past partners. But they did take off the next day, a Friday which was warmer than usual at nearly ten degrees, to wander around the touristy sights of Greenwich. 

It had been too kitschy for Matthew, so Robin had never been, but she wanted to learn the history and it was the datiest thing that could have been construed as surveillance. One of their current marks was a docent at one of the museums on site, and while they could have stayed only for the duration of his one-tour shift, they had made a day of it.

He came back from a cigarette break to find she’d masterfully packed snacks, as always. They included little tiny tea sandwiches that disappeared rapidly into his bearded mouth, and miniature fruitcakes she’d made from scratch after learning from Lucy that they were his favorite.

In her dream version though, everything was rotten, including the expression on his face. There were flies everywhere, and he was cursing her for ruining the surveillance trip. 

The rest of the conversation was nearly identical to the real-life version, save for the flies swarming them and the maggots in their wake. 

He had mentioned how much better their new partnership was than any he’d ever had, and how he hadn’t realized what it would be like to love someone so capable and self-assured, who didn’t need to taunt him with mind-fucks in order to feel important to him.

She had agreed, and, thinking of the day she’d left Matthew the last time, asked what about the end of his time with Charlotte had given it finality.

“Well, you know about the baby-that-maybe-never-was,” he’d said. “That’s not the kind of shit you play around with and lie about, and I guess it felt like there was nothing sacred or off-limits from her nasty games. And most of the time my need to uncover the truth didn’t extend to her, but with that, it did.”

“What would you have done? If you’d known?”

“Well, if the baby was fake, as I suspected, it would be the same. I’d’ve left. If it was real, I planned to marry her, just to protect it from her walking shitshow. I’d be a bad dad, but I couldn’t leave a kid with just her for raising.”

“That makes sense,” she said. It was hard not to feel bad for him, knowing how intensely he craved order and truth and justice. “It would be a bugger of a start to life.”

He twigged her nose, a brief oasis of playfulness breaking through his seriousness at the sound of her Yorkshire accent. “Yeah, bugger indeed,” he said, emphasizing with care the crisp, proper sound of the first vowel.

“That’s why it would have been different with her. Anyone else, and they could make their own decision. No partnership needed. Abort it? Fine. Grow it and send it out for adoption? Secretly, I’d prefer it, knowing there’s people like Nick and Ilsa who want those babies, but I’d never stick my opinion where it’s not needed. If she wanted to keep it, you know, I’d pay the support that was needed and maybe make a couple more visits than my old man, but not enough for the kid to know who I was and miss me, you know?”

She hadn’t given it much thought and though she liked kids and had wanted them with Matthew until moving to London, she’d assumed they were out of the picture when she and Strike had stepped, cautiously but passionately, into a relationship the day she’d moved out of Nick and Ilsa’s house back in November.

“For what it’s worth, I don’t think you’d ruin your kid. You’re good with Jack.”

“Yeah, him only, and I’m still awkward as fuck.”

She laughed. “Point taken, you hate them. What about that one over there, he looks like he wet the bed this morning.” She pointed to a little boy wrapped into a blue scarf twice as big as he. Just as Strike moved his head from her lap to look, the boy tripped on the scarf. 

In real life, she’d felt awful for joking about him and had to push down the desire to run help so that she didn’t appear disloyal to Strike’s recent monologue. Knowing her well though, he’d sussed that out immediately and laughed at her, which was at least better than laughing at the boy.

In her dream, when the boy tripped on the scarf, he fell through the earth as if into a grave, sending up a cloud of flies in his wake. The wails of his minder drowned out the joke real-life Strike had made about a naughty child in a nearby pram.

Robin looked down. Though in reality she hadn’t been pregnant at the time, her belly was swollen. It soon burst like the satanic Cesarean in Bombyx Mori, though the ball of light turned out to be maggots which devoured Strike as she watched.

Robin woke, frozen but sweating. As she stumbled to the bathroom to vomit, she recited the mantra she couldn’t abandon, though it never helped.

It was only a dream. Kind of.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The flat-headed-baby thing can actually be attributed to many causes other than/in addition to not being held enough, so it certainly shouldn't be stigmatizing to parents, but I figured Robin's emotional side probably wouldn't see it that way.


	7. Voice of Wisdom

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This one picks up just after the last one again!

The next morning, Robin was getting ready for work, trying to cover the violent dark circles under her eyes when she received a call from Ilsa.

She’d expected this months before, actually, and had been surprised and a little hurt when a call had never come. Though she knew that splitting herself from Cormoran would lose her the best friend she’d made in London (once Cormoran had been promoted to lover, Ilsa had moved up the ranks), but she’d thought they’d have a discussion about it. It wasn’t a conversation she looked forward to, but the fact that Ilsa had let her slip aside hurt more, as it felt like she hadn’t meant as much to Ilsa as Ilsa had to her.

“Robin fucking Ellacott.” There was no initial greeting, but then Ilsa did always come on strong once she was comfortable with someone (and Robin suspected she was just as firm, if more politely so, in the courtroom).

“My middle name is Venetia, actually.”

“Robin Venetia fucking Ellacott, just what do you think you’re playing at?”

“I’m sorry Ilsa, but I’m afraid I don’t know exactly what you mean? Of course I suspect it’s about Cormoran, but what’s happened that you’re calling just now?”

“Charlotte bloody Campbell is what happened! I knew I’d done my fair share of meddling getting you two together, starting up curry nights, hosting you both for Christmas, talking Corm up whilst you lived under my roof and having Lucy whisper in his ear, as well. I put way too much effort into that because I believed in you two and wanted the best for him, so when things seemed to be going south I thought I’d let you two work it out on your own, just in case I’d been wrong from the start even though I know good and bloody well I wasn’t.

“And even though I didn’t butt in myself, I thought you’d both come to one of us, but he never said a peep beyond deciding which of the subcontractors to promote, and you’ve gone full ghost and then things got quite busy for Nick and me lately. I didn’t mean to let so much time pass but if he’s gone back to Charlotte bloody Campbell, we really all must intervene. So tell me, what on earth is on, Robin?”

“I resigned from the firm. We should never have mixed business with … pleasure.” She’d hesitated on the last word, not sure what would properly encapsulate not just the erotic aspects of it (which had been perfect beyond what she’d previously thought possible), but also the personal, the care, the daily intimacy of having lives so entwined.

“What kind of explanation even is that? You’ve given me all of the effect and none of the cause. What really happened, and why didn’t you tell me, Robin?”

Robin was shocked to hear her friend’s voice crack. “You’re Cormoran’s oldest friend, Ils. I could never ask you to betray him when what you have is so special. It wouldn’t be fair to you, and it would ruin him.”

“That’s bullshit, Robin Ellacott. I did not invite you into my home for months just for a short, casual fling of a friendship and you know it. I may be Corm’s oldest friend, but I know good and bloody well I’m your best friend, and you should have come to me.”

Robin looked wearily down at the phone on her vanity, where she’d placed it on speaker to continue getting ready for the day. She had tried giving herself the same pep talk but knew that even if Ilsa would be comfortable with confidentiality, Cormoran would never forgive his oldest friend for keeping the child from him. 

Although she maintained (despite wavering yesterday in light of the photos of him with Charlotte’s twins) that having the baby without telling him was her best course of action, she knew he would be tempestuous when he found out. And she knew he would. London wasn’t quite that big when you worked in the same industry, shared friends, and knew where one another lived and drank. And were detectives, for that matter.

But he obviously didn’t want this child, and while she may not have been so concerned at making a joint decision a year or more into their partnership, they weren’t committed enough yet for her to not feel that she was trapping him by bringing it up. And it wasn’t as if she could keep working with him while raising their child separately from him, or continue their relationship while doing either.

No, secrecy was her best bet.

During her introspection, it seemed Ilsa had settled back into her ranting admonition. Robin had no idea what had been said before the lawyer concluded her argument with a question. “Who ever said anything about betrayal, anyway?”

She was answered, not by Robin, but by Switch’s voice from the doorway, carrying through to the speakerphone. “Nearly set Robs? If we don’t get the next train, we won’t be able to stop for Monday pastries.”

She stared at the floor. “Could you just see that my work bag is sorted, please? I don’t know what state I left it in last night.”

“Roger that. Shall I add your cooked egg and vitamins as well, or will you have time before –”

“That’d be great, thanks.”

He tapped the door frame on his way out, and Robin glanced back down at her vanity. She’d hoped beyond hope that Ilsa had hung up during the exchange, but of course someone as keen as she wouldn’t have given away any potential answers.

“Right, and who was that then, ‘Robs?’” 

Though Ilsa occasionally used the nickname for her, she made a mockery of it this time. 

“Is that what the betrayal is, then? I wouldn’t have thought after everything, you - no. When Louis mentioned you’d moved out to live with a new partner I’d just assumed it was a work girlfriend from a new job, but. Robin.”

Ilsa’s voice carried a maternal disapproval in its tone, so much so that Robin almost expected her to suggest heavy-handedly a move back to Masham. Though it seemed her parents had finally outgrown that the last time her life had flipped upside down. 

“That’s basically what he is, Ils. Just not a girl. Really. I do need to go, though, as he said, we’ve got to rush for the next train.”

“Right. Don’t be a stranger, though? You know I can keep the secrets you need me to, but you also do know your situation best. I’m sure we can find something that doesn’t ‘ruin’ you, myself, or Corm.”

Robin laughed at her friend’s heavy-handed sarcasm. “Yeah. Thanks for everything, Ils.”

Though her sensitive, naturally empathic soul may make one imagine her a crier, Robin rarely was. That morning though, she had to tilt her head back to keep the tears from rolling down into her carefully baked concealer. April and Vanessa were lovely girlfriends, and Switch was one of the best, unlikeliest, supports she could have hoped for, but she had missed Ilsa Herbert. She couldn’t help but think back to the second half of March, between leaving Cormoran and starting the Academy when she’d gone thirteen days without talking to anyone but occasionally Louis and her disembodied, slightly-more-than-imaginary future baby.

She wished to God she’d called Ilsa then.


	8. Summer 2013: Not that weak, surely?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> We're still in the same day as the last chapter, but this will be the last one here for a bit! Slight time skip to the next one and then the major skip after that.

Because they were still in their probational training period, which would last nearly two years from their first day at Hendon, Robin and Switch were each shadowing one half of a set of partners in the Abuse and Neglect division. Robin was riding shotgun with her training partner Evan Jemison, a tattooed forty-something who reminded her just slightly of a younger version of her own fierce mother.

“This next one is gonna be hard, Ellacott. You ready?” her partner warned as they pulled up alongside John and Switch outside a yellowish-grey brutalist housing development in Catford. An eight-year-old girl had been found shivering outside of it this morning, claiming she’d been kidnapped and held inside. It was now their job to search the man’s apartment, although they suspected he’d done a runner.

After checking in with the other officers on the scene, they began their walk up to the apartment. Switch swung his arm over Robin’s shoulder. Seeing Evan rubbing at her temples, he called out to her.

“Oi Jemison, you didn’t let Robin sing along to the radio, did ye? That’ll give you a right headache. We went out to a karaoke bar with Ekwensi and Bargate just once, weren’t ever invited back. Sings like a parrot caught in a mousetrap, this one.”

She shoved him aside. “We were on the police frequency, Tittaker.” He laughed raucously, and even the ever-stern John Schmidt smiled just slightly at their antics, until they reached the flat and solemnity reigned once more. 

Robin was systematically photographing each object in the apartment while Evan dusted for prints on the usual surfaces. Schmidt had taken the task of gathering up all the electronics he could find, and what corner of the dingy flat Switch had disappeared to, she wasn’t sure. She was photographing a key fob on the floor half under the entertainment stand. The area was a bit of a mess, most of the films and games which had been on the stand were tossed about and a thick book (which Robin suspected had been hollowed out based on the angle at which it stood) was overturned on the floor near the fob. 

Sitting back on her heels, she perked up her ears. There was a slight whimpering sound emanating from the bedroom. Had the kidnapper had a cat? The little things which occasionally humanized the criminals their division often dealt with made any job more difficult. Evil kidnappers weren’t meant to have pets, or any shred of love in their hearts. It made things less black and white. 

Leaving the fob and book behind, she walked into the flat’s sole bedroom, she found Switch kneeling next to a lumpy, whimpering blanket. He flashed her a concerned expression as he whispered comforting reassurances to the lump which Robin gathered was a child. Switch was generally good with children, having smiles on their faces in seconds even though generally face-to-face contact with the likes of their investigative division was usually an indicator of poor circumstances for them.

This little one, however, wasn’t so keen to emerge from his cocoon, reminding Robin of when they’d first rescued Rountree and he’d been scared stiff of all men. She sat crisscross on the floor next to her partner, having to lean heavily on his shoulder to get down there. Just a moment after hearing her gentle voice, the child’s teeny head peeped out of the blankets. Teenier than she’d expected, probably just over two years old and shrunken in of malnourishment, with a bruised eye.

“Hi poppet,” Robin cooed. “Are you cosy in there?”

The little head nodded. “Would you maybe want a cuddle instead?”

He nodded again. “You’re a mummy,” he said, reaching out and placing his little, slightly grubby fingers on the bump which was clearly visible beneath her work uniform.

“Just about to be,” she said gently. “But my baby’s not quite ready yet, she has to grow a bit more first.”

She placed her hand over his smaller one, noticing from the reflection in the window behind the child that Jemison and Schmidt had entered the room with them. “What’s your name, poppet?”

He stared blankly back at her. Maybe she hadn’t broken enough ice yet. Normally Switch had that covered in a mo, but as the child seemed to fear him, she’d had to step in. “This is my friend, he’s called like a light switch. Isn’t that funny?”

He smiled now, gave half a laugh at Switch’s peculiar name, and plopped his right thumb squarely in his mouth. Around it, he said, “I’m called Sam.”

“Right then, Sam, would you like to come on a trip with us?” He eyed Switch warily at the suggestion.

“It’ll be good fun,” Robin encouraged him. “We’ll get you a lolly when we’re there.”

He looked between them, then finally nodded, just barely. Switch first helped Robin to her feet, gave her a pat between her shoulder blades that may have better fit a pair of athletes running relays, and bent down for the child. Though Sam looked less than enthused, he made no sounds of protest, which concerned Robin. She’d learned in a child psychology course at university that children whose cries were never met with care usually stopped crying.

Switch turned to Schmidt and Jemison. The latter quirked an eyebrow at the scene she’d witnessed, which provoked a glare from the other officer.

“Practice?” she quipped. It was widely believed around their wing of Scotland Yard that her child was Switch’s, primarily because neither of them ever addressed the subject to say otherwise, and all of their colleagues were aware they lived together.

“Time and place, Jemison. Jesus.” Robin had never been more grateful for Schmidt’s reliably disapproving nature.

“Are we waiting for a social worker, then, to bring Sam a car seat?” Switch refocused them to the task at hand. They’d paused their canvassing of the squat for now, not wanting to retraumatize the child by having him witness as they picked apart his home, if he viewed it as such.

“Got one in my boot from a case yesterday. We can go on and make our way back now, the heavies out front’ll make sure no one comes in and tampers with the evidence, so we’ll get the kid sorted then loop back after lunch to do the rest of the documentation.”

Everyone murmured their assent to Jemison’s plan and gradually got sorted for their journey back to the office. As Evan got the car seat settled into the backseat, Robin swayed a heavy-lidded Sam back and forth. Turning around to grab the child, Evan eyed her trainee. 

“You excited to be a mum, Robin? Can’t be too long till your maternity leave now.”

“Couple months yet,” Robin corrected. It was nearly August now, and she wasn’t due till early October, around her own birthday, though first babies tended to come slightly late. 

“And I am excited, I guess. Not in the giddy way I’d always expected I would be for my first child, but then the circumstances are different, having just started a new job and being recently separated.” Jemison looked at her quizzically. “And then, you know, she wasn’t exactly planned. Which I feel bad of just cos I don’t want her to find out, and wish I could give her that, but I can’t change it, you know? So the lack of giddiness does make me feel a touch guilty.”

They sat in silence for a bit as Robin’s partner drove, her words hanging between them. Evan Jemison could see why most of the department was endeared by and admired the down-to-earth Yorkshire girl in equal measure. She’d witnessed her ability to professionally distant when the situation called for it, but seemingly saw no need to play aloof when circumstance didn’t demand it.

“That must be hard, Robin. It’s hard to get giddy for something you can’t properly expect in the first place, let alone with so many other uncertainties.” 

Robin unbuckled her belt and walked around back to collect Sam. “Thank you! I’m glad someone understands, Jemison, I was beginning to think it was just one of my particular issues. Mum is threatening to come down, she doesn’t think I’m coping well with it and didn’t quite get that having another person underfoot may not help, just bring about more stress. And I swear I am managing, with what I’ve got to manage, but you can’t expect I’ll have emotions and plans yet about something I can’t…well, can’t know how to experience.”

Switch came up alongside them now, entering their department where the social worker could be seen sitting in the reception area. “I wish you wouldn’t warn your mum off so harshly, though, Robs. Do want to meet her.”

“Yeah, yeah, you will, Petey. Won’t be any keeping her off once there’s a baby to hold.” She brushed him off, but was deeply grateful for her mother’s unflapping support, though she didn’t always feel or express it.

Extricating themselves from Sam took longer than expected, though they did deliver on the promise of a lolly. Any other promises or grand statements and she knew, both from her police training and her psychology courses, that it would be endlessly more difficult for him to navigate the system that likely lay ahead of him and form healthy attachments in care.

Utterly knackered from the experience, they moved along to the break room for a tea. The shelf above the kettle had an odd assortment of collective mugs. Some were carefully impersonal - there was a set of four solid navy ones Switch quite liked – and others seemed like they may have once been freebies from some long-forgotten event, or had a former life in the very back of a family’s kitchen cupboard before being soundly banished to the office. Robin liked to choose the ones that seemed to have once been greatly loved, creating little backstories for them and fancying the idea of making them feel favored once more. Not that they, of course, had feelings, as they were mugs. Switch teased her about this regularly. 

She placed a bag, water, milk, and two sugar cubes in her own mug (which bore a concerningly anthropomorphized bookworm today) and moved to the navy mug, adding two bags and mashing them both thoroughly. She set it down in front of Switch, who’d been reading on his phone and took his first sip without looking up.

He spluttered. “Robin, Christ! You planning to coat some train tracks with this creosote?” He gagged, and she laughed apologetically. “You know I like it weaker, why do you always make it so strong? Seriously, aim for the color of your arm next time.”

She frowned in disgust. “Eew, Petey! Not that weak, surely?”

He laughed. “Not really, but maybe if you aim for that we’ll get something usable. Fuck’s sakes.”

She laughed again at how put out he was, yet swapped their mugs in apology. It really was disgusting; Switch had a point. “Maybe you should make the tea from now on.” She grinned, and he rolled his eyes.

*** 

Across London, Cormoran Strike lay on his girlfriend’s sofa, sated. He didn’t often skive off work on a Monday morning, but he’d been out late on surveillance the night before and hadn’t slipped in through Charlotte’s side door until just after three.

They saw one another mostly when the twins were with Jago or one of their expensive nannies, which was often, but his work schedule was even less permitting than it had been just before they’d called it quits the last time. She hadn’t voiced her complaints yet, but he knew she would, and hoped he’d have the strength (or intervening friends? Where was Ilsa, anyway?) to leave her when she did.

She stretched and yawned on the other side of the settee, emitting a little purr as she did. Had she been any other woman, he probably would have teased her for her behaviour’s resemblance to a cat’s, but that wasn’t the type of humour Charlotte took kindly. Her finnicky temperament was cat-like, as well. He snorted at the realization, and though she looked at him oddly as she stood, she fortunately didn’t comment.

“Tea?”

He nodded. “Thanks, Lotts.”

He scrubbed his right hand down his face as he mentally reflected on the day ahead. The agency mostly had suspected adultery cases at the moment, which though hopelessly dull paid well for minimal effort. Which reminded him, he needed to find a time to tail the new subcontractor, as he suspected she was billing for more time than she truly worked and charging personal things to expenses. If Robin were still doing the admin, she would never have let such a thing slide past the first suspicious receipt or curiously insufficient case report.

Charlotte returned with their tea as he mentally reviewed his diary. He hummed as the sipped his first long dreg. “Perfect cuppa, Lotts.”

“We are good together, Bluey,” she smiled sweetly. He hoped his returning expression looked less like a wince than it felt.

He hadn’t exactly meant to fall back in with her. He’d thought himself immune, actually, but what he had once viewed as a years-long winning streak (and what Nick apparently saw as hard-won sobriety, given the coin he’d jokingly gifted Strike two years prior) no longer felt so necessary to maintain. And it had nearly become an innate trauma response over their sixteen years together, to return to her when other aspects of his life went tits-up. 

He’d initially sought her out, back in May, to ask the truth about the cloud which had hung over their final weeks together. He’d thought that knowing may somehow help him to resolve it to himself, as if maybe he hadn’t moved fully on before, and required this to be a worthy partner to someone else. 

But there was something about the way she’d looked at him so honestly for once, and given maybe the only story she could have told about the baby that would have predisposed him to sympathy, and before he knew it, he was back in her web. A masochist, really, or maybe the change he’d felt from Robin had only been caused by proximity to her, rather than a lasting impact.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> YOU GUYS I'VE FINALLY PLOTTED OUT THE WHOLE THING AND I'M SO EXCITED!!! As I said at the beginning, I'd been fully pantsing this before, but then it got to the stage where I couldn't really keep going without knowing how it would eventually resolve (peep the new tags as well😉). I've also written the last chapter and I cannot WAIT for you all to read it, but we've got a ways to go yet.


	9. December 2013: Christmas Shopping

Just two weeks before Christmas, Robin was in the Marks and Spencer children’s section, picking out newborn baby grows. It was her first solo outing without the baby, and she felt oddly like an octopus, as she was so used to wearing or holding or otherwise tending to her child that to have two whole arms to herself felt novel and unnecessary. 

Switch, who’d sworn he didn’t mind, was keeping little Leda, as they’d both taken to calling Melody Grey Ellacott, who’d been born just before Robin’s own birthday in early October. She didn’t remember which of them had started the nickname, and while she couldn’t deny that the name Leda had occurred to her early on, it had felt inappropriate when estranged from Cormoran. With Switch, even though he hadn’t known his mother, it felt more appropriate. 

She was deciding between a dress with embroidered flowers and one with an applique of music notes, which was less pretty but would suit her daughter’s name, when the sound of someone clearing their throat caught her attention.

Ilsa was standing in front of her, teary-eyed with wide open arms and a precious baby of roughly nine months in her trolley. He was gurgling and had those little baby spectacles which wrap around their whole head so as not to be dislodged. Robin felt herself matchingly teary-eyed out of joy for her friend. In addition to her loyalty to Cormoran, one of the reasons Robin had been wary of being honest with Ilsa was her fear that it would be hurtful, she and Cormoran having taken precautions not to become pregnant and being surprised, while Ilsa and Nick had tried wholeheartedly and been disappointed.

Pulling back from their loose, trolley-laden hug, she brought her hand to wipe the errant tears. “Oh, Ilsa. You’re a beautiful mum.”

“Thank you. We adopted Joey and his older sister in June, and this little one is due in May, though we’re trying not to get our hopes up again. They say this does happen sometimes, conceiving after you adopt, but it’s not been well-researched or anything. But yeah, we’re very happy.”

“Congratulations! That’s so wonderful for you but, oh, I’m so sorry, the timing of my – I hope I didn’t add any unnecessary stress.”

“Oh, no, Robin, I’m sorry it meant that I didn’t reach out to you sooner. There was just so much on, and three months passed right in the blink of an eye. I wish we’d been there for both of you.”

Robin shrugged, conveying no harm had been done. The movement brought the baby dresses back above the top of her trolley, and Ilsa spoke again.

“Right then, who are you shopping for?”

“My niece!” Robin said, maybe too excitedly from the effort of thinking quickly on her feet. Maternity leave, which would fortunately be ending right after the holidays, had gotten her out of practice at upholding covers. “My eldest brother and his wife had a baby this summer.”

Ilsa raised an eyebrow, an expression Robin hadn’t seen since she and Cormoran had wonderfully, finally gotten together, putting an end to the meddling which had begun to grow on Robin. 

“May want to go for a bigger size then.”

Robin said nothing, placing both dresses in her cart. If Ilsa ever suspected, over the intervening years, that the stories Robin shared were not about her niece, she never said.

***

Bath time in the Herbert household was a chaotic affair, but a chaos which they’d wanted for years, so Ilsa always tried to enjoy rather than dread it.

Tonight, at least, she and Nick were both home, which didn’t necessarily keep them any drier but did diminish the chances Jane would run buck naked down the hall while Ilsa still had Joey in the plastic baby bath they kept in the clawfoot tub. 

“Have you spoken to Corm lately?” she asked her husband once Jane had finished listing with great enthusiasm the things she hoped Santa would bring her.

“It’s been a couple days, I think. Why do you ask?”

“I saw Robin in M&S today, she was shopping for her infant niece, she said.”

“She said?” Nick continued shampooing their daughter’s hair thoughtfully.

“Yeah.”

“But you don’t believe her.” He glanced at Ilsa now, wearing the “differential diagnosis face” all doctors adapt after long enough in the profession.

Ilsa draped her favorite baby towel, the one with a little hood that bore a frog’s face, over her chest as Nick rinsed the shampoo from his hands and passed her the baby. She patted him dry before responding. “Not particularly. There was something off about her, but then we know from Louis and that phone call that she’s moved on. So it’s not a sure thing that Corm would even know what’s up with her, but I just wondered whether he’d mentioned something.”

“He hasn’t. Hmm. I’ll ring him after bedtime though, see if he fancies a later pint? Would be good to catch up anyway.”

She nodded. Though they weren’t formally detectives like their friends, each of their careers involved a bit of investigative work here and there, cross-examining witnesses for her and discovering disease for him. They were good at it, but it was undeniably less pleasant when your friends were the subject.

*** 

Two hours later, the children freshly in bed (and hopefully to stay), Ilsa had just sat down to an herbal tea and a briefing she needed to review before an early morning meeting when the bell rang. She sighed. That would be Corm, and she’d bet Nick had forgotten to tell him to text rather than ring the bell at such a delicate hour of the evening. Hopefully Jane didn’t wake, she was a bit more difficult to persuade back to sleep than her younger brother.

Her suspicions correct, Ilsa undid the latch and chain to find her oldest friend. 

“Alright Corm?” He grinned boyishly at her whispered greeting. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d been able to hug him without going on tiptoe, even for her arms to go around his chest rather than his neck, as taller women were able to do. He was easily a foot taller, had it been thirty years? Probably twenty-five, at least.

“Yeah, and yourself?”

“Just fab, thanks.” She caught a whiff of him as she pulled away, concerningly strong for eight p.m. before a trip to the pub.

“You reek!”

“It’s my new Listerine, forgot to get the minty one.”

“Hmm.” So many suspicious people today. “Right then, Nick’ll be down in a jiffy, d’you need anything?” It would be silly to offer a tea when he’d be out the door before it could boil, but she’d been raised better than to welcome someone in without offering at all.

“Nah, I’m good, thanks.” Nick appeared from upstairs, and they greeted one another with a hug. Her husband dropped a kiss on her head as he leaned into her space to grab his keys off the entry table behind her. 

“If I’m not back before you’re in bed, sweet dreams, Ils.” It had been his kind way, since the days when he was a junior doctor with horrific hours, of telling her not to wait up without saying the phrase he found aggressive.

As Ilsa waved them off, Cormoran lit a cigarette. “Right then, what’s up in your neck of the woods?”

Small talk about the children took them through the three-minute walk to the Duke of Cambridge and until they were seated with their first beers. Strike made the effort almost entirely out of love for his two friends, though he would concede that their children, likely due to having less nervy parents than Helly Anstis and his sister and Greg, were more enjoyable to be around on the whole. He’d initially been a bit out of his depth when hearing he’d have a goddaughter for a change, but he was certainly more invested with them than the other unfortunate members of his ragtag band of godchildren.

“How’s Charlotte?” Nick asked, seemingly without preamble.

Cormoran shrugged. “Suits me alright. Has to work out time to see me around the twins’ custody arrangement, so she’s not as available to control and manipulate me as she once was.”

He ran his index finger around the rim of his pint glass, which in accordance with the pub was a bit swankier than his preference, but such was the nature of the Herberts’ borough.

“Reckon I’ll end it soon.”

“You just said she suits you alright, Oggy, why would you end it?”

Strike raised an eyebrow, not having expected anything remotely resembling pushback from the friend he knew disapproved of his relapse. 

“Not that I don’t want you to. Just want to get inside your head,” Nick backpedaled.

“The twins can talk now, just random words here and there, and I rarely see them, but I’m not comfortable being around when I know it’s not long-term. One of them, the girl, she called me ‘Bluey’ the other day. I’m a proper recurring character they can identify, and I know how much anxiety mum’s different partners used to bring Lucy. Granted, they were pieces of shit, but I don’t want to be the first bloke on that crazy train.”

“Fair.”

“Yeah.”

“And Robin?”

Cormoran’s head jerked abruptly to his friend, and a little beer sloshed from the glass he’d raised halfway to his lips. “What about Robin?”

“She hasn’t been around lately.”

“Yeah, well, if you’re just wising up to that I do worry for your patients, mate.”

Nick rolled his eyes, unbothered by Strike’s ribbing.

“I noticed. Now I’m asking why? Where is she? What happened with that?” He gestured vaguely in the air above the table with his hand, as if his questions and many others were floating tangibly in the air between them.”

“Hell if I know why. She handed in a notice in March, no proper reason. I reckon she’s at the Met; I doubt whatever would make her leave me would turn her off investigative work altogether, or convince her to give up what she loves. But she could also be PA-ing for an MP, or working for Culpepper or some other type of journalist ferreting out seedy stories, or… She was offered a job on practically every case we worked together, even some of the infidelity ones where the client’s line of work had nothing to do with detecting, just for being diligent and nice! So I’d guess policework, but she could have been hired anywhere.”

“And romantically?”

Strike was grateful he hadn’t been sober before the first beer, and was ready for a second.

“That’s why I think she’s still detecting. If she just didn’t like the job, she would have answered my calls. Plus, Louis said she’d moved in with a new partner.”

“Shit. Sorry, Oggy.” For all the women Strike hadn’t cared to keep around, and the one who did matter…

“S’alright now. Another round?”

He nodded, and while the taller man was at the bar, covertly texted his wife. _Whatever’s up with Robin, Strike’s not involved. Clueless and not looking??_

____

The reply was nearly instantaneous. _Weird._ Then, _Something’s up here._ And finally: _I was positive she was crazy about him. Why would she just vanish? And you’re sure he really isn’t looking?! He MUST know something that’s stopping him._

_______ _ _ _

“So you expect me to really believe you just thought of Robin, out of the blue, and brought her up so long after she left? What really brought her up, Herbert?” Cormoran asked as he returned to their table, setting the beers down a bit more harshly than necessary. Time waiting at the bar had allowed him to think through the past few moments, and something was certainly amiss.

_______ _ _ _

It seemed his detective skills were none the lesser for his not wanting to know. Nick cleared his throat and sipped at his beer.

_______ _ _ _

“Ilsa saw her in M&S, buying Christmas presents for her niece.”

_______ _ _ _

Strike snorted. “Stupidest thing last year, Stephen and Jenny announced they were pregnant by buying everyone else baby-themed Christmas presents. Obviously they were meant to be regifted back, what use would Linda and Michael have for bottles and nappies? So selfish, _the baby is the gift _or some shit. Robin thought it was cute. Thanks for not announcing you were adopting that way.”__

_________ _ _ _ _ _

Nick laughed. This probably put to bed whatever suspicions Ilsa had had, given that the niece actually existed. 

_________ _ _ _ _ _

“Well Oggy, if we’d been approved around Christmas…”

_________ _ _ _ _ _

They both laughed, knowing that he and Ilsa would have never done such a thing, nor would their friends have appreciated it, and conversation moved along to a conference Nick was preparing for work. Strike was glad his relationship with the Herberts hadn’t been drastically changed by the year’s developments.

_________ _ _ _ _ _

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This ends part one! Major time skip before part two begins :)


	10. September 2017 : So Will I

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Woohoo we're now back to September 2017! This chapter officially starts Part 2, in which each chapter has a song associated (which is what happens when I plan ahead.. Maybe I'll go back and add them for the prologue and Part 1?)  
> This does feel a bit like I'm ripping off Blue_Robin's wonderful The Music Made Me Do It series, so cheers + credits to her (and everyone else with lovely song-inspired pics) for making that a thing in this fandom.

_You say, what if things start changing?  
I say, we'll be changing with them  
We'll just sing a different melody  
And dance at different rhythm  
You say, what if I give up?  
I say, that it's one thing that I'll never let you do  
You say, what if someone leaves me  
And they leave me empty-handed?  
I say, losing only teaches you  
To not take things for granted  
No, I can't just bring them back  
But darling, I can hold your hand and promise you... _

_\-- Ben Platt, So Will I_

***

Cormoran rolled over and groaned loudly. It had been years since his last sleepover, and he’d forgotten how the slight dis-ease of having company made him sleep so lightly.

Peering over the edge of his bed, he confirmed that his groggy expletives had fortunately not woken his nephew Jack, who was still soundly resting on the camp bed.

He didn’t play doting uncle terribly often, but his sister had texted a week before, worried (despite the fact that the academic year had only just begun) her son had lost interest in school and become quite withdrawn, and as such she’d hoped he could re-inspire him, “even if it were into a military career,” a phrase he chose quite deliberately not to be offended by.

By the time he’d showered and had his first cigarette (in the stairwell, as he couldn’t lean out the window without standing over his nephew), Jack had awakened. Though he wasn’t exactly a child-raising genius, he had enough hard-won social skills to know better than to spring immediately into his sister’s desired conversation topic, which would have made the reason for his nephew’s visit apparent. Instead, they’d mostly played FIFA on the gaming console the boy had brought until the wee hours of the morning.

Cormoran surveyed the dark circles under Jack’s eyes. Lucy probably imposed a strict bedtime even on her older, teenage children. “I’m no chef, probably not up to snuff with whatever it is your mum cooks for breakfast on the weekends –”

“Blueberry pancakes.”

“Pardon?” Cormoran hadn’t expected the murmured interruption.

“Mum makes blueberry pancakes on Saturdays. And a fried egg, cos you need protein when the pancake sugar wears off or you’ll be a grumpy goon.”

The older man smiled, remembering Saturdays in Cornwall when Aunt Joan had made (and said) the same.

“Right. Well I’ve never flipped a pancake in my life, so I’ve got toast and cold cereal or we can go down the road for a fry-up.”

“Fry up.”

The walk to the Breakfast Club on Berwick Street took just over ten minutes, slowed by the fact that a farmer’s market-craft show of sorts had been set up on the street leading up to the cheery yellow café. Strike had a love-hate relationship with the wastes of space; on the one hand the loiterers buying pointless baubles and clutter had an uncanny knack for stopping dead in their tracks, making navigation difficult, but they also provided great surveillance cover. On the off chance that they happened to be located precisely where his mark was, and nowhere else.

With that rare trade-off in mind, he wondered aimlessly and hopefully whether it was the last market of the season before autumn well and truly settled in.

Neither of them ended up actually getting the full English they’d theoretically set out for, with Cormoran ordering steak and eggs and his nephew ordering the “Hero Roll,” which was far too out-there for Cormoran to consider a proper breakfast. Strike, who’d never really appreciated or given tremendous thought to the earning of hero status despite the fact that it had been attributed to him numerous times for various things, wondered how eating barbecue and butternut before noon made someone a hero.

“So, has school started yet?” he asked, hopefully casually enough, as Jack added more and more sugar to his tea. He suspected Lucy may be the type of mother who didn’t yet allow him the strong stuff in the mornings, but that his nephew wanted to appear more grown.

“Yep, just did. Year Ten now.”

“Good god, you’re getting old!” Jack grinned, looking for all the world like the nine-year-old boy who’d preened when asked whether he’d grown taller.

“Not so old as Luke! He’s in sixth form now.”

“What subjects did he choose?”

“Maths, economics, and Italian.”

“That’s a neat combination,” Cormoran said, to be nice. He supposed it didn’t quite break his usual policy of honesty whenever possible, because he’d not said that he found the combination interesting. Just that it was. To someone.

Jack rolled his eyes, his line of thought on the subject apparently similar to his uncle’s.

“What should I choose for the Army?” he asked with enthusiasm. It didn’t exactly convey the school-related drought of motivation Lucy had engaged him to quell.

“Well, depends what you want to do in the Army. Theoretically, as a soldier, you could join up in two years with no A levels at all.” This was almost certainly the opposite of his job here. At least his cover was strong.

“I want to be like you.” The statement was hushed, breathless. As an afterthought, he added, “And Uncle Ted. I want to investigate.”

“Do you specifically want to investigate the Army, or do you want to be in the Army to investigate? I could always do with another partner; you wouldn’t need basic training or to go so far from home and worry your mum into a tizzy.”

After saying it, he wondered whether his sister would really be more amenable to her son being under her brother’s professional guidance. At least in the Army there was structure, organization, an insurmountability to it all. She wouldn’t feel she had a say, which would make any potential unsavory outcome much easier to accept.

“The Army.” His manners seemed to make him regret the evident ease of his decision. “Sorry. I mean, you’re alright and I’d maybe want to work with you someday, thanks, but I want to go to war zones and be in the thick of the action.”

Strike figured a practical discussion on what “action” entailed, including the effects – both visible and invisible – which had marred him for life could wait until closer to his nephew’s imminent joining up. Not that he’d ever done many things with his sister’s happiness in mind, but he’d likely return her a less-motivated son than he’d been delivered, and Jack would likely be better poised to appreciate and make decisions from such a conversation in a few years.

“Right. Again, depends a bit on what you want to do. If you want to enter as an officer, which would take you to Sandhurst for the better part of a year, or as soldier class like I did. Requirements are different; I know for soldier class you’d need decent English and maths GCSEs. No university required, but you’ll want to keep your options open for now; don’t skive off your other subjects just because the military doesn’t need them. You could decide you want a degree in psychology or criminology, both would be excellent background for investigating, and you don’t want to box yourself into a corner there.”

His nephew nodded with such seriousness Strike would have hardly been surprised had he pulled out a notebook and started taking notes. Trying to find reason for the listlessness and dissatisfaction Lucy had reported but which Strike himself had not seen, he asked after their recent move.

“It’s swell, yeah!” Fortunately Strike had plenty of steak in which to hide the scoffing grin his nephew’s diction provoked. “It’s not too far so I can still see all my mates, and it’s been ages since I’ve had my own room, so that’s nice. We can spread out more.”

Lucy and Greg had had a fourth child years ago, much to their middle son’s displeasure. Though pleased for them and not nearly enmeshed deeply enough in their lives to be truly affected by it, it had felt to Strike like nearly everyone in his life had had a baby at once, which had made him feel lonelier in the wake of Robin’s departure, isolated without the buffer he knew she would have provided between him and his friend’s children.

Strike asked about the youngest Fantoni child now, or more specifically Jack’s opinions, in a way which made the boy laugh and which only a sometimes-distant uncle could have managed without sounding like a right bastard. 

“It’s just soooo embarrassing,” Jack moaned, his opinions apparently unchanged. “No one in my year has brothers or sisters in primary school, let alone younger! We have to do kiddy things all the time, and the popular kids at school said at least one of us must be accidental, that there’s no way we’d be twelve years apart and all wanted.”

Aha. There it was then, wee bullying bastards. He would have expected Jack to be less susceptible to that sort of teasing.

“Did I ever tell you my mum had another baby when I was eighteen?”

Jack’s head jerked up from his “hero roll.”

“He was quite a nuisance at first, especially as I had to do quite a bit of minding, which you know is not my cup of tea. But,” He took a bite of egg-covered steak and spoke around it, wiping some yolk from the corner of his bottom lip. “Then, one day I’d taken ‘im to the park to get out of the house; he would cry for hours but liked if ‘is pram was moving. So I’d found this one picnic table where I could sit there and study, but stretch my leg out long enough to push his pram back and forth with my foot on the pavement. So we’d do that a lot. And there was this girl I fancied at school, Nicola, she’d never given me the light of day, but one day she happened to see us in the park and boom. Putty in my hands. I dunno what evolutionary shit that is, but once girls see you all nurturing-like, they eat that up. So you could use that to your advantage, at least.”

Jack looked curious, with an underlying air of internal conflict. “What happened to him? The baby?”

“His dad’s grandparents took him in when mum died; I haven’t seen him again since the funeral.”

“Oh.” The younger boy appeared hesitant, then seemed to be steeling himself, breathing deeply and steadily. “I wouldn’t be needing that anyhow, there’s this boy...” He sneaked the teeniest peek up at his uncle through his lashes before continuing in a rush. “His name is Benji – er, Benjamin – and we met playing football in the park over the summer cos he just moved toward our neighborhood from up past Hampstead Heath, and he’s new at school. I asked him to be my boyfriend last Tuesday and he said yes.”

Cormoran was surprised, partly at Jack’s sexuality which he’d not known previously and partly at the gush of warmth that flooded his chest. Cormoran Strike was not a gushy, touchy-feely man and his nephew’s young love would not be changing that. No, it must have been the temperature of his second freshly-brewed tea.

“That’s lovely, Jack! Is he your first boyfriend then?”

“Yeah, and I think you’d like him. He has the Arsenal home shirt, which is actually why I talked to him the first time.”

“I’d love to meet him.”

Jack made eye contact for the first time in some minutes, pure joy and then gravely crestfallen. “That would be great! Just, Mum doesn’t know. It’s been hard, not talking about school or friends or anything because I don’t want to lie, but if it never comes up then I wouldn’t have to.”

Strike held the eye contact with what he hoped was a kindly, warm level stare. He needed to choose his words carefully, to convey the certainty of his mother’s acceptance without making it out as if comparing the relationship to the turbulence of their childhood which had tended often toward the violent, the unspeakable, the unsavory. No, he’d never want to give the boy that sort of complex and wondered briefly whether saying nothing at all would have been preferable but eventually decided the risk was worth the assurance of acceptance.

“Right, first off, your mum loves you. Unconditionally. Beyond that, you having a boyfriend is a wonderful, beautiful, and wholly good thing. I mean, so long as he’s a good bloke and supportive and nice which it seems he is. And I know that telling them who you are, whether it’s something new you’ve come to terms with or something you’ve been keeping to yourself for a while, feels really big and new and different and scary and I don’t want to downplay all of that because coming out is a massive experience. And so for your family, it presents a big opportunity to be supportive and helpful and affirming for you. Right?”

The boy nodded, lower lip between his teeth and brows furrowed.

“And it probably feels like your family is the most stable and mundane thing in the world and that bringing in a new element will upset that dynamic a bit.”

Cormoran hoped to any spiritual power out there he was right on that one; he was normally quite good at reading people but again, this would’ve been a bad time to be wrong. But Jack nodded once more.

“To that, then, don’t worry. Which I’m sure must feel absolutely impossible and like such silly, frivolous advice. But your mum and I saw a lot of unexpected things when we were kids, and not only did they surprise us, but lots of times they were scary or dangerous as well. And even when she had no control over the external circumstances, she was always able to bring love, and stability, and positivity and support. She is an absolutely amazing woman, Jack, and know that if she could do all of that with negative situations that posed an actual threat, she can absolutely take your good news in stride.”

Jack smiled. “You’re right, Uncle Corm. I dunno if I’m quite ready, but she will be good about it, won’t she?”

Cormoran took a swig of his tea and clapped his nephew on the shoulder. Not bad for a Sunday morning’s surveillance.

*** 

On the other side of London the next morning, Robin and Switch were not having quite so smooth a day. Her brother, Martin, had stayed with them for the weekend which meant Robin hadn’t done the usual shop, laundry, meal and outfit prep. She liked to lay everything for the week ahead out on Sunday nights, and as such was thrown off rushing to pack lunches this morning. She and Switch had an early meeting at Scotland Yard, which they expected would detail their next undercover assignment, and so Martin had offered to see his niece to her nursery before catching the train back to Yorkshire. 

Lunches and work bags packed, Robin was finally able to scribble a last-minute note to her brother with her goodbyes and the tasks he’d need to complete that morning. The good thing about having family as houseguests was that they didn’t put you out _entirely,_ though Robin was a bit put out that her work partner and brother had seemed for years to like one another better than either of them liked her. And she hadn’t slept terribly well with Leda in her twin sized bed; the three-year-old ran like a kicking, mumbling furnace in her sleep. 

“Is it the second week of the month?” Switch asked as they strode as quickly as possible down the front walk. Robin was still securing her earrings and necklace.

“Dunno, why?” He reached out unsolicited to hold her bag, allowing her to fasten her watch more easily. “Cheers.”

“Think we may have staff meeting tomorrow.” 

“Buggering bugger. That means it’s time to floss Leda’s teeth. Fuck.”

Robin Ellacott was a patient woman with many things, but her child’s dental hygiene was not one of them. Though it likely would have been ideal to do so more often, she’d begun the practice nearly a year ago of flossing Leda’s teeth on the nights of her team staff meetings, as both practices were excruciatingly painful, dreaded by all involved parties, and offered little to no tangible, immediate benefit. Linking the two events assured she wouldn’t forget, and so the torture was at least regularly, if not adequately, administered.

Switch snorted at his friend’s obvious displeasure. “You know I wouldn’t mind, Robs.”

“You are amazing, Petey, but that’s beyond what a roommate and committed uncle should ever be expected to bear. Lovely offer though, you gem, you.” She gave his forearm a thankful squeeze.

“Maybe I’m doing it for myself, trying to avoid a trip to A&E for a busted eardrum.” Both laughed. “Really though, one of my old nannies used to have some solid tricks. She’d turn the telly settings so the picture was upside down, and I could watch from her lap on the sofa. And she had some kind of special kiddie floss, I’ll see if I can message her and get the name of it. She was ace.”

“Kristina?”

“God, no.” He shuddered. “Janet.”

“I feel like I only ever heard of Kristina.”

“That’s cos she was Kristina the Infamous. Horrific. She actually only stuck around a couple months, for all the stories I’ve got on her. There was one other lady, briefly, after her and then Janet stayed with us till I was nearly fifteen I think. The mum I never properly got to have.”

“Do you remember her, your mum?”

“No.” He looked over at her as they waited for the green man. “Probably for the best, though. I was with her, when they found her.”

She shuddered and grabbed hold of his hand as they crossed the street, as if he weren’t a twenty-five-year-old man who could bench press her in his sleep but rather more reminiscent of her daughter with her (overly plaque-y) milk teeth not yet falling out.

“I didn’t know that. I’m so sorry, love.”

“Yeah, no one told me, but I started to get really curious about her, around the time Janet retired, actually. Went through all the public record documents from Jeff’s trial, the tabloids about Leda, everything I could find. That’s how I found out; it was a key piece of evidence against Jeff actually that she wouldn’t have done anything untoward with me in the bed. But he said she would’ve. Quick-lime girl. I was actually going to seek out Cormoran and ask him about the case, because I'd seen he testified in court, but just around that time was when he got his leg blown off. It was at the bottom of the gossip columns for a week or so, and again when people started putting pressure on Rokeby to acknowledge it.”

He sighed. Robin squeezed his hand, thinking of Donald Laing’s first wife internally injured on a mattress with her baby just out of reach in his crib, both left for dead, and how Cormoran had been unable for weeks to tease apart the criminal stylings of the two men. She understood now in a way she wished she didn’t.

“It’s why I became an investigator.”

“And in our division.”

He nodded as they emerged from the Tube at Westminster.

That afternoon, now prepped and primed to a nauseating degree on the child trafficking ring that was suspected to be hidden in a well-known wedding planning company, Robin wished she could return to the levity of those morning moments, laughing with Switch in the autumnal, slightly dirty and concretey breeze wafting off the Thames.

He’d pulled his phone out of his trouser pocket, the screen full of Spotify notifications, and been unable to shove it out of sight before Robin strongarmed him and pocketed it.

“What’s this, Petey? Have you got a secret band you’ve not let on about? Or a podcast?”

She’d noticed the song names all related to goats. Some kind of goat farming podcast then, which would explain why he’d been less than forthcoming on the subject. Not one to shame someone for their passions but rather a supporter of friendly character building, Robin had ribbed him briefly before finding the teasing turned on a dime back toward her.

“For how long, then, have you and Martin been uploading my snores to Spotify, you daft apeth? And are you getting royalties, cos if so I’d want my fair share, it being my oxygen and all?”

“Since Christmas.” After a momentary pause and side eye, he added, “2015.”

She’d laughed, too flummoxed and amused to be genuinely annoyed. It wasn’t as if anyone knew it were her, anyway. 

Walking back toward the Tube on her way to Leda’s nursery, she reflected that she couldn’t have revisited the morning’s mood if she’d tried. Something had changed. Normally Robin loved going undercover, and the added reward of their impact on young children’s lives generally made it a more compelling experience these days, especially as now being a few years in, she and Switch had more independence and were quite well-known as a good team to send in together. But something told her she wouldn’t enjoy this case.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry this took so long! This section of a story is always the hardest for me to work through, as it's super important but not the initial intrigue or the Big Reveal™️. I've got a couple of deadlines coming up so there probably won't be another update before the weekend, but then things are relatively chill for a week so I'll try to get as much out as I can before they get wild again!


	11. Let it Go

_Tryna fit your hand inside mine  
When we know it just don't belong  
There's no force on earth  
Could make it feel right, no  
Tryna push this problem up the hill  
When it's just too heavy to hold  
Think now is the time to let it slide  
\-- Let it Go, James Bay _

Forever and Everywhere was, despite its kitschy name, one of London’s most upmarket wedding planning agencies. Robin remembered it from the days of her own engagement, having wanted to use it for convenience’s sake but being unable to justify the price. 

It was targeted to young couples, similar to but generally wealthier than herself and Matt, who’d moved to London for work but wanted to get married back home. Their primary perk was that their offices and showrooms were located in London, but then they would transport their services, tailored to your specifications and preferences down to the millionth hue of white, to wherever on the island of Britain you were marrying. Their advertisements justified their prices by the fact that, by not buying countless train tickets home and taking off work for long weekends, their clients truly saved money. 

Though her calculations were six years out of date, Robin doubted the claim’s accuracy. The tradeoff was only thinly possible if one earned a hundred pounds per hour and would otherwise take one day off per week to book first-class train tickets to Inverness. For three months. No, she assumed the company just didn’t expect anyone to check them on it. Just as they didn’t expect anyone to check out the fact that the business model was truly a front for a human trafficking scheme, which would be Robin’s job come Wednesday.

It seemed that a hometown-visiting wedding planning scheme was a perfectly respectable reason to have beautifully marked, official vans travelling up and down the country any day of the week without suspicion, and if there happened to be a stray young girl about she could be shoved into a frilly dress and called a flower girl, wasn’t it such a shame that she’d spilled juice on her original dress but good thing they’d been able to head back to the warehouse quickly for an adequate spare.

Fortunately, one of F&E’s employees had caught on that flower girls were spilling juice far too often for it to be coincidence and had contacted the police. The Met’s Abuse and Neglect division would be running a quite sizable sting operation into the company over the next weeks, if not months. Robin would be undercover as a wedding planner and Switch as a van loader and driver, which would hopefully give each of them the opportunity to observe company goings-on and attend a couple of wedding transport shifts. They also had coworkers who’d be joining the tech and catering subunits.  
As was usual, Switch took one of her brother’s names and his own mother’s surname, making him Jonathan Strike. Having realized long ago that Venetia Hall had racked up quite a resume, and thus taking the name for each job would be unsustainable, Robin often alternated that name with a couple of others, among them the once-blue-haired Bobbi Cunliffe and Rosy Whittaker, a play on Matthew’s long-ago nickname for her, Rosy Posy. 

Rosy Whittaker would be, beginning in two days’ time, reporting to the generously-glassed One New Change retail and office centre in the heart of the City. Bedecked with a million and one windows and a rooftop restaurant, she supposed the prestige of the building must have justified the high rates to their uppity clientele. Though the case promised to be excruciatingly sad, Rosy would be a fun cover to put on for a bit, with a fresh set of hazel contacts, a fat stack of platinum and diamond wedding rings, and swapping her no-nonsense bun and uniform for more fashionable professional attire and floozier hairstyles.

For now, though, there was Monday night to get through, the week’s preparations she hadn’t taken care of the night before, and tea to make. She was scouring the fridge for inspiration while Switch sorted their bags at the shelving and coatrack they kept by the garden door.

“Leftover roast beef?” She’d made the roast the day before for Martin’s stay, as he’d half-joked years back that their mum’s Sunday roast was the real reason he’d stayed at home so long, and he couldn’t get it right himself.

“Sounds good, yeah.” Switch was rifling through the papers in Leda’s school folder now.

“Don’t know that there’s any potato left, though, we might have to find some other veg. I bet Mart took them to eat on the train.”

She popped some ready-made frozen rolls in the oven to bake and produced some carrot sticks from the crisper drawer. They were meant to be for packed lunches but would save her having to chop and cook the cauliflower.

Robin heard a gentle thud from the other side of the kitchen wall, and after a moment’s pause, another followed. From the familiarity of the thumps, she was willing to bet it was Leda removing her wellies. Robin had recently started letting her undress herself at the end of the day to switch into play clothes, which had resulted in some… rather interesting outfit combinations. Yesterday it had been an unseasonably warm camouflage onesie, which was still too large and had been a hand-me-down from their neighbours’ older son, underneath her yellow tutu covered in three-dimensional daisies.

“What about gymnastics?”

“Sorry?” Robin must have zoned out; Switch’s question appeared to be a non-sequitur. 

“I know you’re a bit upset Leda can’t realistically have a horse, or any of the lessons and fun your gymkhanas brought you.” 

‘A bit upset’ was an understatement if Robin had ever heard one. One could more easily call a hurricane a drizzle. She, Martin, and Switch had had a boozy, reminiscey chat on Saturday which had resulted, after one too many of Martin’s mocking recollections of her early days misadventures with Angus, in her tipsily sobbing over the things on which Leda would miss out as a result of her London upbringing.

“So, I have no solution for that. We could never afford to stable a horse here, or even private lessons; they’re practically a pound a minute.” She was touched that he’d clearly looked well into it. “But, Diane was telling some of us in the breakroom the other week about her daughter’s gymnastic lessons. She said it’s the highlight of her week, keeps her fit, and the team structure is good for socialising and leadership and all that. Plus they have some kind of skill level progression at the competitions, so it teaches that kind of goal-setting vibe.”

“I’d not thought much about it at the time, but there was a flyer in Leda’s folder today about a gym that does children’s group lessons with kids from the school. The pictures look like it starts out all fun and beginner and safe, plus it seems like parents aren’t expected to sit and watch, so that would give us a bit of free time one afternoon per week.

He passed the flyer over. It did look like a child’s dream, with brightly colored foam equipment and smiling instructors leading them in front rolls. Plus, there were no uncomfortable metal bleachers where parents were clearly expected to sit and watch, and where Robin would be forced to endure inane gossip. 

She set the paper down to remove the rolls and reheated beef from the oven. “That’s a brilliant idea Petey, I bet she’ll love it. Not quite a pony, but the best we could do, I think.”

He hurriedly set the table as she plated the food. “Leda, love!” she called. “Time for tea!”

The girl appeared with a clumsy, not-quite rhythmic clattering. She was wearing the same tutu of the day previous, but now paired with a batgirl nightie and an orange construction vest, and child’s dress-up heels with a plastic crown and bow, which explained the clatter.

Robin curtseyed overdramatically at her entrance. Leda giggled, and Switch bowed his head reverently. “Welcome to tea, Your Highness.”

“’M not my highness, Uncle Petey,” she said. “I’m Princess, Roadbuil’er, Batwoman. The Ballerina.” She announced, with a slow and careful, though faintly lisped, precision. Like her mother, she enjoyed a good character, and they were usually highly entertaining combinations of identities.

“I’m pleased to make your acquaintance, Princess Roadbuilder-Batwoman-the-Ballerina. Would you please kindly sit down at the table?”

She sat, still preening at the proper use of her title, and began regaling them, in her stilted, almost-four-year-old fashion, of how she’d made a new friend playing hide and seek on the playground, and how they’d together managed to bribe a mean boy to stop throwing rocks at the lizard on the pavement track and join their hiding spot instead. Robin smiled fondly at the glimpses of her daughter’s character which had begun to emerge more frequently in recent months. The smile soon faded into confusion.

Leda had taken one of her carrot sticks and placed it between her lips, where she let it rest momentarily before grasping it with her index and middle fingers, eyebrow arched and lips pursed, the very picture of a miniature, aloof Audrey Hepburn. 

Robin carefully arranged her features into what she hoped was a stern expression. Switch had his head turned and was “coughing” into his napkin.

“Where did you learn that, Leda?”

“Geoffie’s mum had one at pick up today. I think it’s a little lolly with a candle, for fairies prob’ly.” 

Geoff Reynolds was a pint-sized prat, and Robin supposed he must have gotten it from his mum. Who smoked in a child’s nursery? Robin wondered vaguely whether it could be considered within her work responsibilities to arrest her for it, as that had been illegal for surely almost a decade now. Doing so would certainly make her unpopular with the mums’ group. 

“Leda, love, that’s not appropriate. Candle lollies are not funny; they’re bad for you and can make you very, very poorly. So let’s not joke about with them. Alright?”

Leda sighed and chomped aggressively on the carrot stick, causing a section of it to fall onto the plate. It sent up a splatter of gravy in its wake. 

“Yes, mummy.”

“Thank you. Now, what else did you learn at school today?”

Leda answered in song form, her voice high and tinny as it carried the melody. “Horsies go neigh, neigh. If she’s brown she’s a bay, bay. Mummies are mares and babies, foals. If she’s a Friesian she’s as black as coals.”

As she affirmed the little girl, Robin met Switch’s eyes across the table. Notwithstanding the haunting memories horse colors invoked from the beginning of her last year with Cormoran, her daughter’s sudden interest in horses, even if it didn’t extend past story time and a nursery song from her teacher, did little to assuage her fears that she was letting her down in a way by not providing that experience which had been so formative in her own young years.

Fortunately, Switch redirected the conversation by asking Leda whether she’d heard of gymnastics or if she’d like to try it. Apparently the staff of the gymnastics school had done a participatory demonstration of sorts before leaving the flyers behind, and Leda was keen to try it. That settled that, then.

As was their usual routine, Switch stacked the dishwasher after dinner while Robin bathed Leda. When she returned some time later, having played for a bit and eventually read her daughter to sleep, it was to find Switch at the counter, numerous slices of bread laid out in front of him and a stack of sandwich fixings beside.

“You didn’t have to do that.”

“I wanted to. No trouble.”

“Well, thanks then.” She moved toward the fridge to pour herself a glass of wine. “We never had a chance to chat after, how was your date with Tiffany last week?”

Tiffany was his girlfriend of at least six months now, if not closer to a year. She worked at The Feathers, a pub where they frequently had work nights out or met informants. Robin had noticed her eyeing Switch (respectfully, but admiringly) over the course of a number of weeks, and had noticed Switch’s mutual interest, but Tiffany hadn’t been willing to openly flirt until Robin had faked a well-timed need for the toilets in order to corner Tiffany in the back hallway and clarify that she and Switch were not an item, and that she could tell they were both keen for one another.

Subtle, she was not, but Robin had become a stellar wingwoman over the years.

“It was good. Great, actually.” He looked up at her and smiled almost shyly. “I think she might be the one.”

“Oh, Petey!” She brought her hands up to her mouth, eyes moistening in her joy for him. “That’s so wonderful! You are perfect for one another.”

Despite her own misfortune in romance, Robin loved love. She loved for those around her to be happy, and mutually supported, and this relationship was certainly that.

Switch set down his spreader to accept her hug. He pulled back slowly but kept hold of her forearms, meeting her gaze seriously. “With our anniversary coming up, I was thinking of asking her if she…” He paused to clear his throat. “If she wanted to look for a place together.”

“Oh.” She glanced off toward the wall, sight unfocused and lower lip trembling. “Oh.”

“I’m sorry, Robs, I know –”

“No, it’s okay. It’s good, actually, it’s the right next step for you and Tiff and that’s what I want. What’s best for you.”

He pulled her back in for a tighter hug, so that his first words were whispered into her hair. “I love you, Robs. And Leda, both, so much. It will be so strange not living with you, you’re the most like a family of anything I’ve ever had. But I think it’s for the best, and not just for me and Tiff. Leda asked me if I was her dad the other day.”

Robin pulled back, stunned. “She never… she hasn’t said anything to me; I didn’t realize she… What did you say?”

He brought her clenched fists up to his lips and kissed her knuckles, chastely and coolly, like a parent might if you’d fallen off your tricycle and scabbed them.

“I just told her he was a very nice man, but that I wasn’t him. But that I didn’t love her any less, just because she wasn’t my daughter. She seemed fine, and just went back on talking about something else, but I’m worried it’s getting to the point that…”

He trailed off, looking conflicted, but when Robin made to respond, he stopped her. He clearly had something important to say, but by the way he was obviously steeling himself, he didn’t seem to want to say it.

“You’re a wonderful mum, Robin Ellacott. You’re raising a kind and lovely and funny and smart little girl, and she adores you, and she clearly feels all the love and support she could ever want. So don’t take this as disapproval of any of your decisions, because they were yours to make and I personally think you’ve made them well. You never told me what the circumstances were when you left her father. So I’m not saying you did that wrongly, because that was a choice for you and him to make and I don’t know all of the details that caused you to set off on your own.

“But I know, as well as my brother knew, what it was like to be unwanted by a parent. It’s a horrible thing. And I really wonder whether he would have wanted his own child to grow up with that background trauma.”

He paused. It had been understood since she’d first told him she was pregnant that his brother was the father of her child, but it had never been acknowledged in so many words. They’d been through and talked through many things together over their four and a half years of partnership, but her failed relationship was not one of them. He knew her well enough to know she wouldn’t have run away from it half-heartedly, or selfishly, or if she thought it could possibly work.

“Again, I’m not criticising that decision, because it’s already been made and it would bring nothing but hurt. I’m just saying that I don’t want to subject her to it again, when I inevitably do move out, by letting her be old enough to really remember and be traumatized or betrayed by me leaving. So I think it’s time.”

She buried her head in his chest and sighed. “You’re too good to us. It means a lot that you care so deeply about Leda. And as much as I don’t want to hear it, because I’m happy as we are and you know I’m not great with change, I do think you’re right.”

*** 

“Yes, I understand _why_ you think you’re right. However…”

Strike gritted his teeth. He was trying his damnedest not to upset his client, because although deluded and infuriatingly hard-headed, the man had become a regular and well-paying customer. Primarily due to the trait which was displaying itself now: he refused to believe that nothing untoward was happening between his employees. 

First it was that they were stealing from the till. (It had only been off by pence or a couple pounds per day, a reliable enough habit to be suspicious, but it was only that one of them was a major butterfingers and kept fumbling the coins.) Then it was that they were secretly putting perfectly good items behind the bins out back and selling them on Facebook Marketplace, which was blessedly easy to disprove: no listings. 

This most recent suspicion, that the co-workers were fucking on the clock, had been a bitch to gather evidence for, as it required him, Barclay, Hutchins, or one of the newer subcontractors to be in the shop regularly and for long periods, monitoring the staff without disturbing them from their natural behaviour. Without being recognised or remembered. He was beginning to think the man’s paranoid tactics may make a referral to Strike’s own therapist in order.

Hearing the new part-time secretary knock on the door to the inner office, Strike seized the opportunity to end the Skype call, apologizing in what was hopefully a convincing way for the other client waiting. Never mind the fact that there was nothing else on the docket for the rest of the afternoon, and she was likely just popping in to let him know she was done for the day.

Once he confirmed he’d ended his call, she surprised him. “You’ve got a potential client in, Mr. Strike. Young mum whose daughter’s gone missing. Shall I show her through?”

As he nodded and straightened up his desk from where he’d laid evidence out to show his previous client, he wondered about this next one. Thoroughly annoyed from scouting out the dry goods store for evidence of workplace relations, he was ready to get going on a case that would actually make a difference for someone. But at the same time, he was wary that the woman wanted to engage his services.

Why hadn’t she just gone to the police?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oops these just keep getting longer and longer, partially because last chapter got too wordy and a bit of it ended up here instead! Hopefully I'll stick to my plans a bit better on the next one ;) Also apologies this has taken so long to write! I wanted something to work geographically in my head, even though I didn't plan to ever mention it, just for myself to know (basically for Robin's work to be kinda near Whitechapel Cemetery, because the chapter after next would unofficially be when the prologue took place, and I had mentioned that he was there visiting his mum...)  
> Then I discovered it doesn't actually exist? Like there was a cemetery sometimes-but-not-formally called that which has been out of use for over a century, so I couldn't figure out where I'd gotten it in my head that that's where Strike's mum had been buried! I searched my e-book versions of the books and it's never mentioned. Was it in the TV adaptations?? I just got a free trial to watch them and couldn't find him saying it in any of the promo stuff on Youtube. So that got me in a bit of a rut. Hopefully the next updates will come a bit faster though, because I'll be quite busy come next weekend would like to get as much written before then as possible.


	12. Someone You Loved

_Now the day bleeds  
Into nightfall  
And you're not here  
To get me through it all  
I let my guard down  
And then you pulled the rug  
I was getting kinda used to being someone you loved  
And I tend to close my eyes when it hurts sometimes  
I fall into your arms  
I'll be safe in your sound 'til I come back around  
\-- Someone You loved, Lewis Capaldi _

Little Leda woke many times that night, which would have normally been blessedly unlike her, except that she was poorly. Robin’s stomach had been hardened by all of the grotesque things she saw in her line of work, but child’s sick was another game entirely. Not only was there the smell, but it required an additional skillset of pretending to be entirely unaffected in order to keep Leda from being too upset.

After she’d bathed and re-pajamaed her daughter for the third time in as many hours, she tucked her into her own bed with a bin beside for emergencies. As much as she didn’t want her to be ill, Leda was always adorably cuddly when she didn’t feel well, which the exhausted Robin felt bad for enjoying. She kissed Leda’s curly hair as she reflected on the day ahead. 

They’d certainly have to keep her home from school, which wouldn’t be terribly difficult. With the bigger undercover assignment starting the next day, there wouldn’t have been much to do today except for individual preparations she could take care of from home or be updated on by Switch. Hopefully it was just one of those quick children’s bugs which passed once it was out of their system, she thought, rubbing her daughter’s back absentmindedly. Neither of them would realistically be able to stay home Wednesday, and while their most regular babysitter (the older woman who lived across the street, whose grandchildren had recently moved to Norway for their parents’ work) would likely be willing to stay with Leda, she’d hate to leave Leda feeling poorly, and would hate to risk exposing Norma to the bug or to a cantankerous child, as Leda could often be when she didn’t feel well.

Bugger. A mental review of the day’s diary also reminded Robin she’d been set to meet up with Ilsa for their monthly catch-up during their lunch breaks. Having drifted only lightly in and out of sleep through the wee hours of the morning, Robin decided six was the earliest time socially acceptable to message her friend. 

_Something’s come up with work, can’t leave at lunch anymore. Could we do breakfast instead?_

It wasn’t a complete lie, Robin rationalized. She truly wouldn’t be able to leave work at lunchtime if she weren’t there.

She slid out of bed slowly and quietly, replacing her spot with a pillow for Leda to cuddle, and padded to the kitchen to make her tea.

As the kettle boiled, she browsed through her email, noting a message Leda’s minder had sent the night before. They sent an email each night with any important reminders, the names of stories they’d read or lyrics to a children’s song they’d learned, and usually at least one picture. When they’d been younger, it also had details about their feedings and diapers and such.

Robin noted the lyrics to the song Leda had sung them about horses. It had four more verses, of which they’d learn one per day for the rest of the week. She would miss out on the lines about miniature horses today. There was also a picture of Leda, grinning and dressed in a gymnastics unitard. They’d seemingly allowed them to dress up for the demonstration. As she poured the water over her teabag, Robin mused whether Leda’s fascination with the gymnastics company was for the sport of it, or the fact that they’d allowed her to dress up. She wouldn’t be surprised if it were the latter.

A text from Ilsa came sooner than she’d anticipated. She’d hoped to clear things with Switch before making firm plans, though she didn’t foresee any problems with him keeping Leda for an hour or so and going in late.

_That’s absolutely fine! Mind if we keep the same café though? Staying near work will give us a bit more time as I’ll still need to be in by half nine. They open at seven!_

Robin confirmed a plan to meet at eight and pondered over whether to wake Switch. She’d need to leave in roughly an hour’s time, and if she left him a note, he may well get fully ready to leave before emerging into the kitchen and spotting it. 

Decision unmade, she sliced a banana and cut bread into strips to make Leda toast strips for a stomach-soothing breakfast. She went on and placed the bread in the oven to toast but stuck the banana in the fridge to keep it from browning, which would certainly bring on a fit. She also gathered the bag of rice for lunch, children’s paracetamol, Pedialyte, and a couple of applesauce cups into one spot on the counter in case Switch were to need any of them before she returned. 

When her mug was empty and the toast, finished, she decided to go on and shower in the hopes that Switch would be up by the time she got out.

Fortunately, he was, and confirmed he was fine to go in a tad late so that she could keep her breakfast meeting with Ilsa. As she got on the Tube, she thought through which conversation topics she could keep to honestly. It was occasionally tricky to keep things emotionally honest while factually vague, and now even moreso given that many of the things on her mind related to Leda: the implications of Switch moving out, though she could mention he was, revolved around adjusting to true single parenthood. The fact that Leda was poorly, though it would be the main theme of her day, couldn’t come up, either. 

Sometimes she did tell stories about her daughter though, playing them off as relating to her similarly-aged niece. She also told whatever work stories weren’t sensitive or confidential, and often employed the techniques she’d learned for witness interviews to subtly keep conversation on the other person, though she was aware Ilsa was similarly trained and probably knew what she was up to.

Seeing Ilsa was, as always, lovely. The bespectacled woman was a bit frazzled, as she was leading the prosecution on a heavily-publicised criminal trial, but fortunately Nick was now keeping consultant’s hours and was able to pick up a bit of her slack.

Their elder daughter, Janie, had joined a neighbourhood football camp for kids over the summer which had just ended. Ilsa beamed with pride as she detailed what a skilled goalie the girl had turned out to be, showing Robin an album of pictures in which the child gleamed atop a podium, in a number of team pictures, and posing next to a goal with a ball and her gloves, a gold medal dangling over her emerald green kit.

“Oh, that is so wonderful, Ilsa! Is she going to play during the school year, as well?” Robin asked, smiling.

“We haven’t decided; we’d like for her to but haven’t figured out the logistical arrangements. The school doesn’t have a partner program and the neighbourhood after-school one would be a bit tricky to work out drop-offs and pickups and such. But I know she’d love it, so I might start casting about for a carpool or something.”

“Oh, that would be nice! I hope it works out for you.” Ilsa smiled and nodded. “It does remind me though; my niece is just starting a gymnastics club for little ones, and she’s so precious in her little uniform! I wonder if my brother and his wife thought about football instead, it seems like it would be a bit safer.” She laughed casually.

“Have you got a picture?” Ilsa asked. She had long ago forgotten her suspicions about Robin’s niece, as they had been quite decisively put to bed by Cormoran’s confirmation that the child existed, so she had no idea the weight her question carried for Robin.

Trying not to let her face reflect the firestorm of thoughts going on inside, Robin decided it wasn’t too risky to show Ilsa a picture of Leda. She’d never done so before, but her daughter looked very much like her mother, having inherited only her dark brown ringlets, which were hardly the most distinctive feature, from her father. “I think my sister-in-law sent pictures through to the family the other day, let me see if I can find them.”

Robin pulled up the email that had been truthfully sent by Leda’s teacher and opened the picture so that it filled the screen, holding the phone out for Ilsa to see. The woman struggled, but succeeded, in keeping her composure.

The child had a riot of brown curls held in place by a headband which matched her gymnastics unitard. Her face was a doll-like near-replica of Robin’s, with the same round blue-grey eyes and mystical symmetry, save for her nose, which was not button-shaped but long and narrow with a slightly snubbed tip. Robin almost certainly had no way of knowing what Cormoran’s nose had looked like in childhood, or that this girl bore a striking resemblance to her primary school playmate. No, Ilsa realized, she was probably the only one in London who could tell, save for Strike himself and maybe Lucy.

What on earth was she meant to say to this revelation? At just after nine, Ilsa didn’t have time for the frank discussion and inquiry she wanted to undertake, but she couldn’t bring herself to compliment her best friend’s child when he probably had no idea she even existed. The words she should have said felt like sawdust in her mouth.

Fortunately, a text came through on Robin’s phone, giving her an alternate topic of conversation. “Norman says he’ll come over tomorrow, just let him know what time.”

Robin turned the phone back around and minimized the image. Fortunately, Ilsa showed no signs of recognizing the child as anything but Robin’s niece, who in reality was a petite ginger girl. Leda, on the other hand, was six inches taller than most of the children in her class.

“Oh, that’s Norma! Elderly lady who lives across the street, we try to have her over often, so she doesn’t get too lonely. Her son and grandchildren moved to Norway last year, and she’s retired.”

“We?” Ilsa asked. It probably would have been more sociable to affirm Robin’s sense of caretaking and love for intergenerational community, but Ilsa couldn’t bring herself to compliment the woman who just may be the biggest traitor she’d ever known.

“My roommate. We work together.”

“The same one you had when you first moved out from Louis’s?”

“Yep, that’s the one! He’s wonderful; we work really well together.” Robin considered bringing up his imminent moving out, but a quick glance at her watch revealed it was time she got back to relieve Switch, and Ilsa was needed at work shortly. She sipped the last of her coffee and began to bus their plates, Ilsa following her lead.

“It was lovely to see you, as always, Ils! We won’t make it so long before the next one, yeah?”

The older woman hugged her tightly and returned the smile. “Course not. All the best for your secret mission!”

Robin laughed. “And same for your big case as well, but I know you’ve got this.”

Once they’d parted ways, Robin broke into a speed walk. She needed to get home soon for Switch to still arrive at an acceptably late hour.

*** 

Though he’d have had no way to know it, Cormoran’s morning was just as marred by illness-induced rescheduling as Robin’s. Hutchins, who was scheduled to bring in the key evidence for a drugs case he’d just closed, had had a flare-up with his MS. This meant that Cormoran needed to deliver the evidence to the Met. 

He’d tried, since 2013, to avoid physically entering the Scotland Yard buildings due to his suspicions Robin worked there, but sometimes, such as today, it was unavoidable. It was his first time visiting the new offices, as they’d moved from the taller, mirrored glass building just months prior, but his anxieties were linked to its inhabitants rather than the façade and were not quelled by the new location.

Vanessa met him at the door, which put him at ease slightly as he knew she had the tact and quite likely the necessary information to keep him apart from Robin if she truly did work in the building. 

Their progress through the offices was slowed when one of her co-workers stopped them in the hallway to ask a question about an assignment. This created a bit of a traffic jam when the man who’d been walking alongside this colleague called out to a tall and lanky younger-looking man whose back was to them. 

“Whittaker! Where’s your partner, mate?”

Whittaker turned to face them, and the usually steady Strike quite nearly gasped. It was a shock seeing his mother’s eyes after all these decades. Neither he nor Lucy had inherited them, but Switch had.

“Under covers, sir,” Switch replied to the older gentleman, whom Strike gathered must have been his supervisor of some sort.

“Beg your pardon? Why is she on a case without you? And I thought you weren’t on assignment until tomorrow?”

“Not under cover, sir, under _covers._ The Cadet’s a bit poorly today, and she drew the short straw.”

“Ah. Best wishes for a speedy recovery to the little one, then.” Switch nodded his thanks, and then the older man faced Strike once more. “Have the two of you met?”

Strike had debated, upon first looking into his younger brother’s eyes, whether he would introduce himself if the opportunity arose, and hadn’t realized he’d decided until the words were out of his mouth.

“Have we met? I practically raised him during my second A level year, me.” 

They all stared, even Vanessa had turned from the conversation with her colleague to examine him. He cleared his throat.

“You probably don’t remember.” He extended his hand for Switch to shake. “Cormoran Strike. Your brother.”

Switch smiled, which in addition to his decidedly posher accent than Strike’s own, gave the impression of a less traumatic childhood. “Heard lots about you, mate. Pleased to meet – er, see you again.”

Vanessa briefly turned her incredulous gaze to Switch at this comment, before it was returned to Strike. “I didn’t know you had a brother, Cormoran?”

He laughed drily, tipped his head to the right briefly. “Well, if you add the two half-brothers together, I suppose I have a brother, yeah.”

Fortunately, Switch took the comment well in stride, laughing freely once more.

“Let’s have dinner sometime and catch up, yeah? I’d love to get to know you. I was about to reach out years back, but it ended up being right ‘round the time everything happened with your leg, and I figured the last thing you needed was an estranged brother coming out of the woodwork.”

Strike was strangely touched by this. He often attended gatherings with his various half-siblings only when necessary (though he’d been somewhat more intentional with family relationships after Jack’s illness years back), but he was genuinely looking forward to getting to know the adult Switch, whom he’d never wanted to lose after his mother’s death.

Vanessa’s eyes were wide as saucers as she looked from one to the other. Strike wondered absently why she seemed to be so personally affected by the revelation of their relationship. Maybe she was friends with Switch, or they’d had a long-ago fling, and she just hadn’t seen it coming? Odd, but then it was always quite shocking when the world got smaller before your eyes.

As the traffic jam began to clear out, with Vanessa gesturing with her head off toward her office, Switch reached out to give a surprised Strike a manly half-hug with a clap on the back. The gesture reminded Strike of the same sight, twenty-three years prior, at their mother’s funeral. 

It had been a number of months since he’d seen his brother at the time, as he’d been away at Oxford and hadn’t visited “home” since the start of term. So the boy, with his dark curls and marmoset eyes, was thrilled to see his much-adored older brother and reached out for him when he and Charlotte walked down the aisle, past Whittaker’s grandparents who held Switch, to sit at the front with Lucy, Aunt Joan, and Uncle Ted.

It had ripped out one of the few heartstrings which wasn’t already decimated to ignore the boy’s wide smile, or the cries which had followed when he was ignored. Switch had eventually relieved himself from his great-grandparents’ care once they set him down on the pew between them, darting off during an admittedly dry speech from the president of the record label at which Leda had briefly been a secretary to sit in Strike’s lap. He had remained there, both of them pleased with the arrangement and the great-grandparents too prim and proper to make a fuss during the service, until he passed Switch off to Lucy to serve his duty as a pallbearer, carrying his mother’s body out of the church with Uncle Ted and a number of other relatives and friends.

It had been a harder march than any he ever undertook in uniform, and it had been the last time he’d seen his baby brother. Until now.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I nearly cried writing the end, poor fragile baby Strike and fragile baby Switch; it's awful to imagine how their world was fully torn apart then. Also fully wretched writing that Strike and Charlotte walked down the aisle, even though it's a wholly different context, aha.


	13. This Town

_"Yesterday I thought I saw your shadow running round  
It's funny how things never change in this old town  
So far from the stars  
And I want to tell you everything  
The words I never got to say the first time around ...  
Over and over the only truth  
Everything comes back to you"_

_\-- Niall Horan, "This Town"_

Cormoran had a productive morning in the office Thursday, primarily conducting background research for his kidnapping case before he was scheduled out for some surveillance in Whitechapel that afternoon. He’d had Spanner hack into the British Missing Persons Reporting Database in search of reports on girls around Sophia’s age who’d been abducted in the past year.

Though side-tracked from his own case, he’d found a suspicious pattern of latchkey kids in a number of large cities going missing, usually from poorer areas and immigrant families. Clicking through the reports for each case indicated that in all but a handful of them, police verdicts had been that parents had sold their own children into trafficking. 

This had often resulted in prosecution against the parents, and even though none of those trials ever turned up evidence of such a sale and parents had always been acquitted, only one of the missing person’s cases had ever been reopened.

The pattern was consistent in all of these cases, and uniformly different from that of the case which he had been hired to investigate, save for one small connection: the new nanny, whom Sophia’s mother suspected of kidnapping, had previously been registered as living next door to three of the victims at the time of their disappearance. She was never mentioned in any of the police reports and wouldn’t have raised a single flag except for the fact that Strike had spent most of the morning investigating the murky corners of her life public records could illuminate, and had a thorough summary of her recent movements taped to the edge of his computer monitor presently. 

Cormoran always welcomed any musings a family volunteered as to their suspects and suspected motives, but he rarely gave much weight to them. In this instance, however, he was definitely beginning to share the mother’s opinion that the new nanny had kidnapped the child. His next step would be to locate her, if he could, and tail her for a couple of days to see if he could find where she was living or working and see if there was any evidence of the child around. He’d be seeing Wardle at his and April’s housewarming party the next evening, so he made a note to ask for any information the Met may have had on the London cases, as they were curiously underdeveloped. Most of the available information was from Leeds and Manchester, where the nanny had lived previously, and from Edinburgh, with two cases each from Bath and Bristol, as well. Whoever was behind them all, if one perpetrator there were, geography had certainly not constrained them.

As he replaced his pen to its home in his desk organizer, a knock sounded on his doorframe. Hutchins and Barclay were peering through.

“We’re never all around at once!” Sam exclaimed gleefully, his Glaswegian lilt now less prominent after a half-decade in London. 

“This, of course, mandates a pub lunch in celebration!” Hutchins announced. Together the two of them had the effect of children collaboratively convincing one’s mother to let the other stay the night.

Strike laughed as he delivered this assessment, to which only Sam took offense, and then he stood. His back cracked. “Right, pub lunch it is, then.”

Hutchins regaled them with the goings-on of his morning’s surveillance. The client’s wife was convinced he was cheating, because although they both worked from home, he had recently been disappearing for hours at a time without satisfactorily accounting for where he’d been. However, Hutchins had just now discovered that the husband, whom he’d resultingly named Laughingstock, was truly enrolled in a stand-up comedy workshop, and he’d not told his wife because he was _horrible_ at it. 

Hutchins had managed to join the class, which was in its third week, because one of the students had recently dropped out. (Andy had suspicions as to why, which he shared with his colleagues, receiving raucous laughter in response. Laughingstock’s jokes really were awful, they agreed.)

“The thing about comedy, that this bloke doesn’t understand,” Sam began, pausing to sip at his lager, “is that you’ve got to be willing to get personal and poke fun at your own life. It can’t all be metaphorical shit about what did the giraffe say to the titmouse. F’r’xample, the Mrs. recently got a new painting. Absolutely loves it, she hung it over the mantle and tells everyone she sees about it. Thinks it’s the most fabulous gift to God’s creation. However, she will not accept the… essential feedback, that it looks like a dick,” he finished perfunctorily, having paused often to choose his words carefully. “Think I’ve got a picture, one minute.”

He scrolled through his phone. “Aha! From when she bought it at a craft show, captioned, _‘Isn’t it the most beautiful thing you’ve ever seen?! Getting it now!’_ ”

Strike snorted into his pint of Doom Bar. It really was quite graphic. “Barclay, mate, maybe you need to refresh her memory, if it’s been too long and she’s forgotten what a proper – ”

Sam blushed and protested at the insinuation it was his fault his wife couldn’t recognize male genitalia. Hutchins and Strike laughed uproariously at his expense. “Maybe she does see the resemblance, and it’s all one massive, interior decorating ploy of a hint,” Hutchins suggested, setting them all off onto another bout of laughter.

“So, um, what’s your afternoon surveillance, Strike?” Barclay tried to change the subject from his personal life.

“Nice try, mate,” Strike joked, but he did give in, providing much less-entertaining updates on their Whitechapel-based mark as the food arrived.

*** 

Switch was not particularly enjoying his cover as a van loader. Though he did lift weights most days and was physically capable of the job, making him a good choice, he did not relish taking load after load of wedding decorations from the stock room down to the lower level of the underground car park which serviced the building that housed F&E’s headquarters. The task was mundane as hell. There was no one about, and the boxes were by far too small to contain hidden children, so it didn’t feel like it had much bearing on the investigation. They didn’t expect to find many answers yet, though, building credibility was the name of the game at this stage. 

He paused to hold the lift door for a girl wearing the uniform of a school a couple Tube stops away, near where he and Robin lived, and did his best to wedge his parcel-laden dolly into just one corner of the enclosed space, so it wasn’t taking up too much room. The girl smiled faintly and thanked him.

Their goals in this investigation were simpler than usual. They weren’t exactly starting from scratch, so there was a difference between the cases where the child was gone but they didn’t know where or because of whom. Instead, they were almost starting from the centre outward, wanting to find who exactly in the organization was aware and responsible, how they were taking the children, and where they were now located in order to rescue them and return them to their homes. In all, there were less open ends than usual, but it was also a far more complex case, with more victims and likely more perpetrators, spread across a broader geographical area. In answering their three key questions, they also wanted to gather and record as much hard evidence as possible in order to put the villains away.

When he reached the van, Switch was perturbed to find that his partner hadn’t been loading the boxes he’d deposited next to the vehicle. It had been quite literally his only job. However, he was pleased to note that this would be his last load, and once they’d packed the truck, he could return the dolly and they’d be on their way to the delivery. (Of course, they could have been on their way already if Chris had just loaded things as requested, but, well. Best not to cry over spilt milk, or however the saying went.) 

As he returned the dolly up to the storeroom, Switch noted a mother and two young girls on the middle level of the car park when the doors opened to let someone else on. Gone was the primary school uniform, and they were a far distance away, but he had an odd suspicion that one was the girl he’d seen before, given her distinctive red curls.

Later, alone in the van while Chris sat on the hood and smoked, he texted Robin. 

_Taking suspiciously long snack and smoke breaks. Just barely outside London now and have been sat near a primary school for three-quarters of an hour. He may be surveilling someone in particular? Don’t know when will be home, delivering to Oxfordshire but unclear if also setting up, if so could be late or tomorrow given that it’s half three now. Also keep an eye out for small girl, red curly hair. Saw her in the car park and felt fishy._

Robin very much agreed with his assessment of the girl. She was enjoying working in the storefront, which her trainer had assured her was common protocol as a starting role for all of the wedding planners. They needed to gain familiarity with the products before they could advise clients on their selections, of course. 

The only downside was that it was putting a bit of a crimp in her investigation, as she wouldn’t be able to attend any weddings as a store clerk, and their briefing had implied that those trips would be most fruitful for their investigation. She was getting a decent feel for the company and its employees from the other clerk, Holly, who had been around for a number of years and was a salacious gossip. The trainer, Kimberley, was less warm, but Robin had yet to decide whether this was a by-product of her resting facial expressions, the effect of having exponentially more tasks to manage, or because she was a criminal mastermind. Probably not the latter.

She was also enjoying employing the skills she’d learned from her long-ago Saturday job at a dress shop in Harrogate. It felt, sometimes, like she was a teenager again. Except that she no longer esteemed marriage as a valued, idyllic institution, which had been a key factor in her daydreams on the Harrogate High Street, not far from where her own wedding dress had been made lifetimes ago. She did her best to suppress this cynical side in front of clients, which was why when a mother and her two young daughters came in and one of the girls was entranced by a wall of pastel bridesmaid’s dresses, Robin did her best to engage her. 

“We’re here for a fitting for the Edgware-Hensby wedding. Flower girls,” the mother announced. Kimberley pounced, oohing and ahhing over the brunette daughter and setting up the fitting room.

Robin followed the other girl, who had curly red hair, to the quiet dream-like corner of dresses. “Hi there, I’m Robin,” she announced.

The girl looked up warily. “I’m Sophia.”

“How old are you, Sophia?”

“I’m eight,” she replied, still not warming to Robin, but then some children were shy. On the off chance that there was a more serious reason for her wariness, Robin pinched one the beltloop of her grey professional slacks to activate the inbuilt audio recorder.

“Oh, that’s so lovely!” Robin may have been overdoing it on the excitement. “I have a daughter named Emily who’s seven, so that’s almost your age!”

She had learned long ago not to reveal true personal information in the course of a case, even though the chances eight-year-old Sophia could or would use it against her were slim to none. The girl merely nodded, not impressed by the fictitious Emily.

“Are you excited to be a flower girl?” Robin asked, given it was the only thing she knew about Sophia.

“I am very excited to be a flower girl. I love weddings. This is my aunt’s wedding and when they are married her husband will be my uncle. I am so happy they chose me to be their flower girl. I had – It will be a fun day.”

The reply was stilted and delivered without and emotion, to the extent that it gave the impression of being rehearsed. Particularly given her confusing stumble over the words.

“Sophia!” The girl’s frightened eyes met Robin’s as her mother called, and she scurried away.

This unsettling interaction was still on Robin’s mind as she picked Leda up from her nursery and walked with her to the gymnastics school, especially as she’d read Switch’s text referring to the same child while waiting for Leda’s teacher to gather up her belongings.

Robin hmmed absentmindedly as Leda recounted the most recent verse of the horse song, punctuating the rhymes with hops in the puddles that had formed in the after-lunch showers. She felt guilty for not giving her daughter her full attention, as she usually found it much easier to turn off the professional and switch into mum mode.

“We played tag on the playground, and Geoffie kept tagging the other Leda too hard, and so me and Bailey had to tell him no sir! Gentle touches only please!”

“Really?” Robin asked to feign interest, her attention on the familiar face she’d spotted in a shop window’s reflection. He was watching her and making to cross the street toward her. What would she do if he forced a conversation?

It was a moot point, as he’d changed directions by the time they were halfway to the gym. She allowed herself one moment to turn fully and drink in the bearlike figure she’d missed for years.

She hugged Leda tightly, kneeling on the damp pavement outside the gym. It was technically a drop-off class, which had been a motivation for selecting it, but as her nose nestled in her daughter’s hair and her thoughts drifted to the redhead in the shop, she couldn’t leave her, and resolved to watch from the parents’ stands. It wasn’t the first time she’d hugged her daughter extra tightly, grateful she was safe and wanting to protect her from the indescribable horrors she saw at work. Usually, though, Leda was asleep, and Robin was teary-eyed. Pleased to have kept herself together in public, Robin gave her squirmy, restless daughter one last kiss on the forehead and opened the door to the gym.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The last bit of this chapter is technically the same scene as the prologue! I was going to leave that just for my own enjoyment of knowing, but it ended up deciding to make itself known more clearly :) Also I literally had it written in my outline for this chapter to "give Strike some joy, foreverhalffull, don't be a bitch," because I am really putting him through the wringer in this fic. Hence, the entirely unnecessary but fun pub lunch scene, which is about as close as I could get to literally waving my arms around saying "See! He wasn't moping for 4.5 years straight I PROMISE!"


	14. You Said You'd Grow Old With Me

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Disclaimer: I'm pretty sure the song of this chapter is actually about someone's partner dying, but that's NOT WHERE I'M GOING WITH THIS :) Didn't want to frighten anyone who knew the song and started anticipating a massive, horrific plot twist.

_“I'd like to say, "I'm okay", but I'm not  
I try, but I fall  
Close my mind, turn it off…  
One last word  
One last moment  
To ask you why  
You left me here behind”_

_Michael Schulte, “You Said You’d Grow Old With Me”_

Strike arrived uncharacteristically on-time to the Wardles’ housewarming party, a bottle of wine in tow. He was hoping to corner Eric to request information on the London-based missing persons cases before too many guests arrived, and the host was already disposed in a conversation. 

He was out of luck, however. There were already six or seven guests present, and Wardle was talking to an older gentleman by the drinks table. As he approached, he could hear they were comparing different brands of drills. Boring as fuck it was, then. He had absolutely nothing to contribute to the conversation, as he stuck to the hardy toolkit Uncle Ted had gifted him when he began school at Oxford, from which every tool still worked, but most had had their logos worn off years before. 

He selected a beer that looked as un-exotic as he could possibly find and allowed himself to be introduced to the man with the greying moustache, who lived next door. He pointed out his wife in the sitting room adjacent. As Strike turned to follow the man’s gesture, he noted Lorelei and Coco, their friendship apparently restored, sitting on either side of a lavender-haired April Wardle on a fuzzy-looking fuchsia sofa. Lorelei was showing off a glinting rock on her left hand, indicating that despite her thoroughly disparaging letter’s claims, Strike had not ruined her for romance permanently.

That did blow his chances for an alternative conversation to the scintillating talk of power tools. Bummer. He offered his only comments, relating to Uncle Ted’s gift, as a sort of toll owed to the area in which the conversation was taking place. This only frustrated the neighbour further, as he was dying to know which brand could possibly last that long and didn’t believe Strike truly didn’t know. He finally placated the man by offering half-heartedly to ask his uncle the next time he was in Cornwall, even though he’d only been twice since Aunt Joan’s funeral years back. 

Not long after, blessedly, April offered for everyone to come through the kitchen and make plates of the various finger foods Eric had prepared. The paper products had little butterflies embossed and painted around the edges, with which Moustache Man’s wife was quite taken, to the point that she would not stop commenting on them. Strike appreciated this similarity between the couple, though even the husband began to look perturbed. 

To change the subject he presumed, Lorelei asked about the rest of the guest list. Three or four couples Strike didn’t recognize had joined the party since he’d arrived, as well as Eric’s parents, who were local. April named off a number of people Strike didn’t know alongside a number of Eric’s work colleagues, whom she prefaced as such, and many of whom Strike did know. The list ended with a name he knew all too well. She had reportedly texted that she’d be a bit late but ‘wouldn’t miss it for the world.’

“Robin’s coming?” Eric echoed Strike’s internal shock. “Is she bringing Petey and the Cadet?”

Strike was sure he’d heard the turn of phrase somewhere, but it refused to surface. It felt like coming upon a line from a Catullus poem he’d liked less and being unable to parse out which of the numbered verses it was.

He could feel April looking pointedly at him and then at her husband, indicating to anyone who’d been previously unaware what a gaffe he’d made. Strike left as soon as was socially acceptable, not trusting exactly what Robin’s definition of “late” was, as she was typically such a punctual person. She very well could send an “I’m late” text for a ten-minute Tube delay. 

In the brief moments between his departure and Robin’s arrival, Lorelei was in full interrogation mode. As far as she knew from April’s casual commentary, Strike and his business partner had dated for even less time than she and he.

“Is he still hung up on her?” she asked insensitively. April looked at her husband, conflicted.

“I mean, it must have been hard on him, seeing her leave him and then settle down with Petey so quickly,” she responded judiciously, as best as she could trying to avoid the speculation and gossip on which her friends (Coco more than Lorelei) thrived. 

Eric was pensive. “I always did wonder,” he said slowly, as if something important had just happened which only he had put together, “whether he ever knew.”

It wasn’t until he was halfway back to Denmark Street that Strike realized he’d forgotten to ask Wardle about the missing children, but it was too risky to go back. He’d gone four years without her and had no desire to see Robin Ellacott ever again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry this one is so short! When I saw it in my outline and realized how little needed to happen, I started to question my choice of putting it on its own, but it didn't combine well with anything that happens before or after, so here we are :) Hope you enjoy! Also to all the lucky ducks who get to watch Lethal White in half an hour's time, I'm SO HAPPY for you!! Hopefully it won't be too long before it's available on iTunes.


	15. Forever

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The goal here is to upload a chapter a day and finish in the next week, so that I'll then have a bit of time to catch up on things the next weekend and can take some time off to binge Troubled Blood?! Fingers crossed... Anyway hope you enjoy this update!!

_Darling, nobody said that it would last forever  
That doesn't mean we didn't try to get there  
I never said that we would die together  
That doesn't mean it was a lie, remember  
Nobody said that it would last forever  
Head in my hands, cold coffee on the table  
Wish you the best, I would if I was able  
\- Lewis Capaldi, Forever _

Robin’s Monday started off smoothly enough, with Switch going over their calendar as she made breakfast.

“Leda was invited to a birthday party this Saturday,” he said, dry erase marker poised to add it to the calendar if Robin approved. 

“Bugger. We may both need to go, chances are the case’ll be coming to head on a weekend sometime with the Saturday weddings, and I’d hate for one of us to get called in and have to bring her home early.”

“Ugh. I much preferred that one at UCL that kept to normal working hours.” It was truly inconvenient that most weddings were scheduled squarely _outside_ of working hours. Though most of their actual planning and loading work could be done ahead of time, the investigation didn’t keep so strictly to the boundaries. 

“Don’t pretend it was the hours, P, you know what you liked about that case was the university girls falling all over you.” 

He grinned unashamed, and she smiled back over the cereal box she’d been pouring for Leda. “I can pick up a gift on my way from the wedding shop tomorrow. Boy or girl?”

“The invitation was pink.”

“It’s 2017, Petey,” she tutted.

“Yeah, yeah. I’m just saying, I got girly vibes from the pink fairy invite.”

“Leda wants superheroes. Christ, I’ll need to start planning that soon. Add that in, will you? For Sunday. Plan Leda’s party.”

“Superheroes! Right on she does! We’ve raised her well, Robs.” Switch’s grin was gleeful as he added Robin’s planning to the calendar. 

“I guess once she can read we’ll – you’ll need to come up with some sort of code for the calendar, for things like this.”

Robin chuckled half-heartedly, appreciating the sentiment and the idea but not the subtle reminder that he wouldn’t be around by the time her daughter learned to read. 

Leda came bounding into the kitchen, putting a pause on Robin’s depressing train of thought. 

“Mummy!” She trilled enthusiastically, “I had a dream ‘bout me car last night!”

“Did you?” Robin slid Leda’s cup out of the path of her tiny, but mightily gesticulating arms. “Drink your milk, love.”

She took an obedient sip before embarking on the story of her dream once more. Leda had believed that Robin’s parents’ old Land Rover, which had unfortunately become unreliable enough to necessitate a retirement behind Michael Ellacott’s Yorkshire barn over the summer, was her own. Though unsure how the belief had begun, Robin found it endearing. 

“But he was sad, cos he missed me, so he became a transformer and — ” Leda paused for another sip of milk and resumed speaking too quickly, so that it dribbled down her chin. Robin passed her a napkin, tutting at her to slow down. 

“And he walked all the way to London to see me! From nan and grampa’s! And he had my batgirl sticker book!”

Robin had thought that Leda had finally forgotten about the book, which had been her reward for being brave at her last round of vaccinations and had been toted along _everywhere_ until Leda left it on the bench seat of the Land Rover. As Switch engaged Leda with a list of potential activities to take the former-Land-Rover-Transformer on a day out around London, she made a mental note to ask her mum to stick the book in the post.

Unfortunately, Robin’s light and joyful morning was quite nearly ruined when Switch spent most of their post-drop-off commute discussing his upcoming move with Tiffany. They needed to settle on a target day to open a lease, and what did Robin think about the first of October? It was really fucking _soon,_ that was what Robin thought, but then London’s real estate market did move quite quickly. She kept her thoughts to herself and encouraged him instead.

Of course, she was happy for him. It had been one of her biggest worries, when they’d first become housemates during their Academy days, that his proximity to her matronly lifestyle would have imposed on his romantic prospects. Even better, she loved his girlfriend, Tiffany. She would make a wonderful aunt. Still, there was the undeniable fact that becoming a proper single parent for the first time would require endless logistical rearrangements in order to keep Leda’s life stable and not lose too many working hours, herself.

The first half of her working day provided little in the way of distractions. Holly, as always, had plenty of mundane gossip to offer, but precious little on the higher-ups the Met’s IT department was beginning to suspect based on the computer records they’d accessed. The only information she could offer had trickled down (probably dishonestly, like a primary school game of telephone) from the annual beachside retreat taken by the execs and investors. It mostly centred around which married colleague had slept with whom, which was blessedly not the subject of Robin’s investigations, and in fact was a line of inquiry she hadn’t had to follow in years.

Around lunchtime, a familiar tall white-blonde woman entered the shop. Her honey-eyed daughters had an appointment for a flower girls’ dress fitting. Robin thought the name of the wedding party was familiar, but then that could’ve been because one of the surnames was the name of two Tube stations in Westminster. She didn’t have occasion to be on that side of London often, but one of the stations was well-known from having seen a horrible explosion on the day she should have graduated university.

Though she didn’t fully expect it to amount to anything, Robin dutifully made note of it in the small notebook she kept in her waistband when she next used the toilets. She also noted and removed a smudge of mascara from under her eyes. They were slightly puffy from her first toilet break, which had also been covert but for different reasons. Petey’s leaving was not timed favourably with her menstrual cycle, and the damn PMS hormones were making her far more emotional than she strictly needed to be over it. 

*** 

Having located Sophia’s nanny over the weekend and followed her home from her grocery shop, Cormoran was in a conveniently located park outside of her Whitechapel flat at seven on Monday morning. 

He first thought the day would turn out to be a wash, as he followed her to breakfast and Pilates, but she emerged from the back doors of the gym’s locker toom at half-eleven with two children in tow. Interesting. Their eyes, honey-coloured to her own slate grey, were less of a tell, but their raven black hair was anachronistic with her own, and there was also the fact that he already suspected her of trafficking. Hopefully, she would lead him now to another key player in the operation, if not the place where the children were kept. 

Their journey took two Tube rides into the City proper, on each of which he demolished one of the sausage and egg biscuits he’d picked up at the McDonald’s next to the Pilates studio. Exiting Mansion House, their walk was short and began up a broad street with glass buildings on one side, and historic stone architecture on the other. They turned abruptly up something he wasn’t sure could be conceived as a street, but rather an alley at the back of the property of St. Paul’s, and took various zigzagged sidewalks before emerging abruptly into some bizarre glass-and-metal amalgamation between outdoor shopping mall and office park.

He waited just out of sight of one of the posher ground-floor retailers as the woman went inside. She was swiftly ushered into the back by one of the employees, who was then replaced by a tall, well-dressed strawberry blonde woman. Potentially this lady, having seemingly laid in wait for the paler blonde, was her villainous colleague?

Going inside was risky, as there was the chance his mark would exit from the way she’d come and he’d have to extricate himself from the employee at once (or worse, be seen by the nanny), but he decided the benefit of interrogating the potential counterpart was worth it and went inside.

His first thought, upon seeing the objectively attractive woman behind the counter, wasn’t that she looked like Robin, but like one of the many covers she had undertaken for the Chiswell case all those years ago. 

Her eyes were once more hidden behind hazel contacts, her brows plucked thinner, and he suspected she had drawn on the freckles which speckled her nose and cheekbones. Her hair was lighter, improbably mixed with early grey strands, and her left hand bore an ostentatious diamond accompanied by a simpler, thin filigree band beneath it. Years of forcibly disliking her didn’t mean he didn’t dislike this development.

His plan had been, when he realized the nanny had been frequenting a wedding planning agency, to pretend to be a groom with questions for her, so that he could feel out whether she worked there. Now, seeing Robin, he reconsidered. What if she saw right through him? Or worse (and he didn’t allow his brain to dwell on the ordering he’d subconsciously imposed), what if she didn’t?

She smiled brightly, though he was likely the only one to notice the deep, fortifying breath she took beforehand, and introduced herself as Rosy Whittaker. Hearing his ex-stepfather’s surname from her lips, especially when he had taught her to choose a meaningful name for her covers, was a shock. He set it aside to focus instead on the fact that she was undercover, concluding that he and the Met must once again be on the same case. With that in mind, he decided to continue on with his original plan, in hopes of feeling out what she knew.

“Rosy, hi. My name’s Cameron, and my fiancé is planning our wedding here. I’m meant to ask some questions today of our planner, I believe her name is – ” He paused, pretending to check the name from his phone. “Sacha Livingsby.”

“I’m so sorry, Cameron, it appears there’s no Ms. Livingsby on our staff. Could you maybe describe her to me, and I could see if I know who you mean?”

It seemed they were on the same page then, working together on a line of inquiry after all the years between them. Nodding at his description, which included physical characteristics and recent outfits, she confirmed that the woman wasn’t an employee but brought in flower girls for fittings often. _Very often,_ she’d said, her gaze fixed on his intently to emphasize the un-routine nature of the woman’s actions. He nodded.

“Perfect. I’m so sorry about that, Cameron. Anything else I can do for you while you’re in?” she asked brightly. He shook his head. 

She called out quite loudly, for the benefit of the other staff, “Remember, left at the third street you cross and then take the next right and you’ll see it!”

One of them, who looked older and habitually cross, sent Robin a confused glance. “Silly grooms!” she said affably. “The brides should give better directions! Someone looking for Forever and Always, _again._ That’s my third one this week.”

Despite her light and unaffected façade, Robin was unsettled to discover she and Cormoran were on the same case. Her own secrets notwithstanding, the Met had never previously come out well when Cormoran was investigating one of their cases, and she feared it boded poorly on her own work this time.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay so the other day, my half-asleep brain was CONVINCED I had solved the case intro'ed in the Troubled Blood sample. I'm a little hazy on the details but the primary premise was that Leda had killed Margot to hide the truth about particular medical records from Corm's birth, I think including that Rokeby's paternity test had come back negative? (Though I think in Cuckoo it may say that the test happened much later, idk.) But then that was why she ran off with lil baby Corm only two weeks after he was born, and also why they never could settle in one place for long, because she was outrunning the _law_. Probably the product of staring at patients' obgyn records waaaayyy too late into the night and then falling asleep reading fanfic, haha.


	16. When The Party's Over

_(Tore my shirt to stop you bleeding) (But nothing ever stops you leaving)  
Quiet when I'm coming home and I'm on my own  
And I could lie, say I like it like that, like it like that  
I could lie, say I like it like that, like it like that  
\- When The Party's Over, opb Billie Eilish but covered by Lewis Capaldi _

Having been on pins and needles all week, expecting to see Strike around One New Change, Robin was relieved when Saturday arrived with its offering of a break from the office building and from the probability of running into him. The possibility of work cropping up wasn’t entirely off the table, though, so she and Switch were tag-teaming a birthday party of one of Leda’s primary school classmates.

She realised as they approached the neat brick house in Bromley with its colourful, well-cared-for front garden that she hadn’t asked Switch who the birthday girl was. She knew only that the child, who was turning four like Leda would be soon, was in her gymnastics class and thus Leda had insisted on the gift being gymnastics-themed. They’d eventually, after a very trying afternoon of shopping and negotiating, settled on a doll with a gymnastics costume.

Not knowing which of the class parents to prepare for (and they varied greatly in tolerability), Robin was relieved to find her good acquaintance Julia at the door. They knew one another quite well, as the older woman had been the room mum of Kate and Leda’s nursery class the year before. Robin leaned in to kiss her cheek and Julia welcomed them warmly, complimenting Leda’s hairbow and taking the neatly wrapped gift the young girl offered to join the generous pile accumulating in a nearby sitting room. She directed Switch and Leda through to the garden, where a number of lawn games had been set up, but Robin remained with her near the front hall, gossiping mildly and harmlessly about Geoffie Reynolds’s mum, who’d apparently been spotted smoking in the school’s hallways again. When the doorbell rang, she made her excuses and left Julia to her hostess duties.

As she stepped into the garden, she noted the distinctive ivy-patterned mint green bow she’d pinned into Leda’s curls that morning lay on the sill of the sliding doors which separated the kitchen from the back garden. She bent to pick it up and called out to her daughter, eventually meeting her halfway across the grass from the house to the flowerbed where she and Switch had seemingly been hunting for something. 

Robin knelt to pin the bow to the small bobble with which she’d wrangled some of Leda’s ringlets into a half-up half-down style. With one hand still gently on either side of the girl’s face, she placed a feathered kiss on her nose. In the four years which had often felt short, but occasionally infinitely long, the gesture had never failed to make Leda scrunch up her nose and giggle, which she did presently.

“Try to keep that on this time, okay? Don’t play too hard, poppet.”

“Yes, mummy,” she said obediently.

Robin smiled and squeezed Leda’s shoulder. Noting a pair of smart, camel-coloured leather loafers behind her daughter, she looked up as she stood, and was so shocked to find herself eye-to-eye with the bespectacled Ilsa Herbert that she quite nearly fell back down from her position halfway up to standing.

Her composure only half restored, she addressed the older woman. 

“Ilsa.” 

She didn’t return Robin’s meagre smile, which was admittedly false. One eyebrow was raised and her lips pursed.

“Not your niece, then?”

Robin hadn’t even let herself dream she’d be able to keep up that pretence with Leda present, and it was highly likely Ilsa had just heard Leda addressing her as mummy. Still, at the guarantee that her cover was blown, icy dread tendrilled deep into Robin’s stomach. Why was Ilsa there? Robin couldn’t help but feel just a bit that her mostly-stable world had just crashed around her like a sand castle being dissolved by a wave.

“Well, I did have a niece round the same time, just not … Yeah. This is Leda, Leda this is Mrs. Ilsa. She’s mummy’s friend.” 

Leda held out her hand, primly, for the tiniest of handshakes with seemingly no awareness of the inappropriate agedness of the gesture. Ilsa couldn’t help but laugh despite the overarching tenseness of the moment.

Over Ilsa’s shoulder, Robin met Switch’s curious, raised-eyebrow gaze, and he approached the trio. “The two of you may have met ages back. Ilsa, Switch Whittaker. Switch, this is Ilsa, she’s Cormoran’s childhood friend.”

Ilsa nearly had to shake her head to clear it. Firstly, because she had never considered that Switch, an infant in her memory, would have grown to be in his mid-twenties now, and secondly that even though Robin had never felt much younger, having maturely blended in with their friend group, she must have been closer to Switch’s age than her own and Corm’s. 

With a start, she realized that nearly everything which had implicated the child as her friend’s could just as easily be tied back to his brother. The nose, the hair, the name which had moments ago seemed the nail in the coffin of certainty, had belonged to Switch’s mother, as well.

All three adults turned toward the house at the sound of cutlery chiming against a glass, and the resultant opening tomes of “Happy Birthday.” Leda shot off like a rocket toward the colourful table where a number of children were sitting, and Robin obediently followed behind, the invisible string that connected them strong as ever. She chose an unoccupied spot alongside the back wall of the house, out of the way of kitchen traffic but able to keep an eye on the table of children without the expectation of socialising with the other parents. She noted distantly that Switch and Ilsa were still talking, and wondered what on earth they could possibly be discussing. 

When the cake was brought out of the kitchen and into the garden by a slight, vaguely familiar brunette woman, Robin realized the party must not have been for Julia’s daughter Kate. The comment Julia had made at the door about helping out due to Greg’s unmovable work trip made suddenly more sense. Robin was quite certain Julia’s husband was called George, but she’d just nodded along, assuming she’d heard incorrectly. 

Now, she remembered a story Leda had told days before about playing tag on the playground. She hadn’t thought much of it at the time, but this party must have been for the other Leda. She’d never known Lucy and Greg had had a fourth child.

As the cake was cleared and the children ran off to various lawn games which had been set up around the generously sized garden, Robin momentarily feared Cormoran may appear, given that it was his niece’s party. The fact did explain Ilsa’s presence. But Robin took solace in her memories of how Cormoran had always complained fiercely about these sorts of do’s, avoiding them like the plague.

Ilsa watched, perplexed, as Robin leaned against the wall next to the sliding garden doors. By the look on her face when Lucy appeared, Robin hadn’t realized precisely whose party she was walking into, and Ilsa wondered about many things, none fully fleshed-out, simultaneously. How had Robin ended up with Switch, and ended up here, and how had she not known it was Lucy’s daughter’s party, and so on.

Something like that shouldn’t have escaped the ever-observant Robin, and she wondered, not for the first time since their last curry night years ago, how the woman was coping. Ilsa turned away to study Switch and Leda, where they’d begun to play one of the many lawn games set up for the young guests, not far away from where Janie was refereeing a game of miniature croquet between her siblings. 

The move meant she didn’t see when, seconds later, her childhood friend appeared through the doors next to her semi-estranged one.

Seeing Robin, here in his sister’s back garden with a drink in her hand as if it were the most normal thing in the world, was a bigger shock than Cormoran had been given just five days before, when he’d seen her for the first time in over four years. He noticed against his will that the hand which held her drink was bare, and he wondered whether the rings had been put on and removed with the freckles and contacts, and for the same purpose. 

He followed her gaze across the garden to a pair standing not far from the Herbert children. The child had long, curly hair, nearly as dark as that of the man who held her — his brother— except that it glinted slightly gold when the sun caught it properly. Her face was a delicate, doll-like near-replica of Robin’s, with the same round blue-grey eyes and mystical symmetry, save for her nose, which was not button-shaped but long and narrow with a slightly snubbed tip, reminiscent of his own before it had broken the first time.

He turned then, from this picture to his former colleague beside him. The look he gave her, though one of his rare expressions which didn’t cause his eyes to crinkle, wasn’t blank, but rather pointed. Analytical. Cold.  
He had never, even in the later stages of their partnership, been an external processor, preferring to piece together cases on his own. 

The presence of the child complicated the narrative Strike had been certain he’d pieced together correctly. He knew she had enrolled in the police academy after leaving him and could assume she’d met his brother there. Her motive for leaving couldn’t precisely be nailed down to a desire for greater professional development; no, she wouldn’t have done that without first trying to work it out with him, enrolling in night classes to finish her degree, maybe, or more trainings from the program which had run her surveillance course. 

It had also occurred to him that it may have been a desire to break up with him romantically which motivated her leaving him professionally, but this didn’t seem to fit her character, either. She had stayed with Matthew upon learning he’d cheated after her assault, for God’s sakes. Was he really worth less? 

He now began to question the order of things, considering the possibility that she had met Switch before enrolling in the academy. This ran directly contrary to the hypothesis he’d finally accepted and not re-examined in nearly three years, that dating before her divorce was finalized had been too fast and she had regretted it. But maybe it wasn’t only Matthew from whom she’d moved on quickly?

“Did you leave me for him?” he finally asked. His tone carried no anger, which surprised Robin, only the mild curiosity she’d long ago acquainted with his process of uncovering a mark’s motive after the means and opportunity implicated them. 

She followed his gaze over to where Leda was standing, leaned back against Switch’s legs now as he corrected her aim at the children’s horseshoe set. 

“No.” She cleared her throat, examining his side profile, while he continued to watch his brother and daughter. 

“I left you for her.”

He whipped around suddenly to face her, glare no longer cold and analytical but harshly accusatory. 

“I left you for you.”

“What the fuck, Robin?” he hissed. Realizing their conversation wasn’t exactly appropriate for a child’s birthday party, he dragged her by the wrist into the alley which ran alongside the house, connecting the back garden to the front walk. 

“How much of a self-centred bloody imbecile must you be to decide the proper approach was to just keep secrets and run from me—"

“I didn’t exactly run,” she interrupted. 

“Oh, and that makes it better does it, the fact that you stayed in London and kept in contact with all our friends?”

He had the sudden, nauseating realization of precisely how many people must have known: Ilsa and Nick, Wardle, and Vanessa all had mentioned, in passing or by accident once or twice, seeing her over the past years. And his sister? She’d never mentioned Robin once yet here she was, at his niece’s birthday party, their daughters apparently friends. 

He retched into the grass and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. She passed him a party napkin, tutting maternally under her breath but looking on otherwise unconcerned. There was, of course, the fact that she’d had four years to fear and prepare for his conversation while he’d been blindsided. 

“You didn’t want this life.”

“How could you have known that, Robin? You didn’t think we could have at least had a chat, rather than just choosing for us both the path which would have been the worst outcome of such a discussion?”

“We did talk about it, Cormoran.” He stared back, expression truly blank now and shook his head faintly. “At Greenwich, on Valentines. You said—"

“I said Charlotte was the only one I’d ever raise a child with.” He gazed unfocused over the fence behind her into the neighbour’s garden, fist pressed to his mouth once more. 

“I didn’t mean you included, Ellacott.”

“How was I meant to know, Cormoran? You seemed so set in what you wanted!”

His steely expression communicated that he knew one way she could have known what he wanted, the one he had already suggested. She could always have asked. 

“It never occurred to me that you would have thought yourself in that population of women. What we had was so far off from all of them, a different league I’d thought you were aware of. And our having children was so far out of the realm of possibility or conversation, you... We were so careful.”

The left side of her mouth raised wryly, in an ironic smile-grimace. Still, though, there was compassion in her expression he couldn’t process. It felt, for a fleeting moment, like it may have had she come to him after taking the first or second or tenth test, and they were facing an uncertain future together. But she hadn’t, and they weren’t. 

“Good god, were you rash.”

He nearly growled the words, face stormy, and when she opened her mouth to protest, he cut her off with a shake of his head. 

He straightened and stepped closer to her, so that he was more in her space and looking down at her when he spoke his next words. 

“I do want to meet her someday, properly. But it’ll have to wait until I can look you in the eyes.”


	17. Hold Me While You Wait

_This is you, this is me, this is all we need_

_Is it true? My faith is shaken, but I still believe_

_This is you, this is me, this is all we need..._

_I wish you'd cared a little more_

_I wish you'd told me this before_

_My love, my love, my love, my love_

_Won't you stay a while?"_

_\-- Hold Me While You Wait, Lewis Capaldi_

Robin hissed and let her head fall back against the cabinet. “My hand slipped.” 

Switch nodded. Apparently finished with the rubbing alcohol and cotton buds, he disposed of the waste in the bin under the sink and ran her right hand under the water there. 

“And it was an accident?” His expression was even and unjudgmental as he towelled her hand and opened individual bandages for each finger. Each bore a slice, thin and straight but deep, bisecting the segment of flesh between the knuckles. The bandages almost bore the appearance of bespoke fabric rings. 

“The sink was clogged, and I was reaching down to grab whatever food bits were in the drain. Got a steak knife instead.” 

He nodded. “Sorry, that was me. Used it for dinner last night and forgot to stack the dishwasher. And I’m the one who poured your milky tea in, as well. You can stab me back if you like.” 

She didn’t quite have it in her to laugh at the joking offer, but she did manage a sad smile. Once his hands and the worktop were cleaned, he wrapped his arms around her midsection in a tight hug, inviting her to drop her head into his shoulder. 

“I don’t know why I’m so upset. It’s my fault. I knew this was coming.” 

“Don’t berate yourself over it, Robs. It’s only right to feel lost and pained when you had hoped for so long that things wouldn’t turn out like this. Remember, you thought you were making the choice he would’ve wanted. And it sucks that you were wrong, but you weren’t being cruel. You were trying to be merciful.” 

Switch had seen Robin through the second-lowest spell in her mental and emotional health and was experienced enough to know exactly the right things to say and do. He’d allowed her a lie-in of nearly twenty-four hours, from the time they’d gotten home from the party on Saturday afternoon to midday Sunday. She’d gathered that he’d told Leda she had a stomach bug like Leda herself had faced not long prior, because she’d received a hand-drawn card with Petey’s penmanship interpreting, in the bottom corner, a message of Get Well Soon, Mummy!! She’d also woken from a fitful nap to find her bed filled to the brim with every single one of Leda’s plushies and briefly, Leda herself before she’d been called away to dinner by Switch. 

He also knew when to force her out of the bed, the exact timing and warning signs that moping and inactivity would soon fail to be medicinal but rather worsen her state. He’d just made such a call now, though he somewhat regretted it as it had brought her unintentional injury. 

And lastly, he’d forced her to call Vanessa and invite herself over. She needed someone to vent to with a little more distance from the situation, but decent knowledge of the key characters. She wanted to wait and have dinner with Switch and Leda, so that she wouldn’t miss it two days in a row, but Vanessa was expecting her at the house she and Oli had recently begun renting later that evening. 

Vanessa welcomed her at the door with a bottle of Moscato in one hand and two glasses between the fingers of the other. Oliver appeared at the door soon after, greeting Robin with a kiss on the cheek and a sad smile before heading out. She knew it was to give her and Vanessa privacy, but he claimed pre-existing plans with a mate at their local, bless him. 

It took halfway down Robin’s glass before she was ready to start talking. 

“You told me he would find out,” she said. “I _knew_ he would find out. But it’s been so long, I didn’t feel like I was living a lie, or expecting a cover to be blown any minute, like I did before I went back to work. I felt safe. It all felt safe.” 

Vanessa topped up her friend’s glass. “Oh, Robin. The fact that he knows now doesn’t change what happened years ago, or what you’ve been continually doing, by not undoing, for years.” 

Robin was generally one to appreciate a harshly honest word when upset. She found that sugar-coating only enabled her to spiral farther on what people were realistically thinking and feeling, but hiding. Vanessa knew this and had provided such support and commentary to her friend on many occasions – familial, professional, and romantic, though not recently. 

Now, though, the strategy backfired. Robin crumpled, and it was reminiscent of the night she’d first slept on Vanessa’s sofa (now banished to the home office-cum-guestroom) after leaving her idiot ex-husband. Vanessa supposed the overly emotional reaction was something to do with facing painful disruption without tangible next steps, which she’d had in spades in 2013. She’d been steady then, before the birth. 

“Oh, Robs. He’ll come around again, I’m certain. What the two of you had was special, and I know there’s still love there. But if nothing else, I gather from what he said that he’ll want to see Leda, and he’ll be won over by her. She’s the sweetest kid and so much like the both of you.” 

Vanessa waited as Robin nodded tearily and sniffled into her wine, but she said nothing. 

“And I’m sure he’ll be a good dad. He’s clever and quick enough to pick up any skillset, and good with people generally, when he wants or needs to be.” 

This set Robin sobbing harder than before. “Oh, Van, that’s the problem!” she wailed. “I thought I was saving _him._ From having to commit to something he never wanted. But the way he looked at me… He clearly thinks I was trying to save her _from_ him. I felt so… so dirty.” 

Vanessa winced and sighed as she ran her hand over her close-cropped natural hair. Sometimes, it felt, there really was no making good of a bad situation. She hoped this wasn’t one of them. 

*** 

Cormoran hadn’t rung, but Ilsa was unsurprised when he showed up at Octavia Street at ten past nine Sunday evening. What did surprise her was that he appeared to be entirely sober, but thoroughly pissed. 

“You knew.” He was barely in the door when he spat the words, accompanied by a jabbing finger towards her shoulder. It was only a gesture and didn’t make contact; he wouldn’t have touched his second-oldest friend aggressively even if held at knifepoint and forced, but the movement was still unlike him, and it set Ilsa off. 

“I didn’t.” 

They were entering the kitchen, she moving to flip on the kettle and he leaning against the wall, before he repeated himself. “No, you _knew."_

“No, Cormoran. Suspected, maybe, for a while yet, but I never knew for certain until the party. I wouldn’t have kept that from you.” 

He was too keyed up to sit down and began pacing. “But you did! There isn’t an ounce of commitment or compassion or conviction in your entire body, Ilsa bloody Herbert, or you would have told me like a half-decent fucking human being!” 

He grabbed at his hair, the curls moderately more dishevelled than normal, not that one could often tell. Abandoning it, he adopted a pose not unlike an Olympic sprinter catching his breath after a race, balled fists atop his head, panting, pacing still. 

“You did keep it from me; you should have told me the moment you first suspected.” He paused. The next words were nearly growled. “Which was when?” 

“Pardon?” Ilsa switched off the kettle and sorted the mugs, finding it difficult to face him. 

“You heard me. When? When did you first suspect?” 

Ilsa gulped. “That Christmas after she left. I saw her in M&S, buying baby grows.” Cormoran swore and punched the worktop. Its marble was fortunately stronger than his punch, but he showed no signs of coddling the rapidly reddening hand. 

“She said they were for her niece, but they looked too small for a baby that she said had been born in the summer. But then Nick took you out for a pint, and you confirmed the niece existed… Plus we knew she was living with this other guy she swore was only a work friend. I’ve been seeing her regularly for ‘round about three years now and never thought much of it again. She did tell stories of her niece, maybe more often than normal, but I just thought – maybe that’s her way of relating, y’know, since I tell stories of the kids so much.” 

She paused and sipped her tea, but he could tell she wasn’t done speaking. “There was – I never met her, and only just saw a picture of her for the first time last week. And I don’t think she knows how much your daughter resembles you as a child, if you ever showed her pictures.” He shook his head. “And so that was the first time in ages that I thought again, you know, maybe I was right.” 

“But then I wondered, when her having a child began to seem probable, whether you’d known, and the two of you had decided to split and you didn’t want to tell us why, knowing we were trying so hard.”

He shook his head wordlessly. His anger began to dissolve into sadness and mortifyingly, he found himself crying for the third time in his life. There had been the time to Leda, about Dave Polworth and the caves, and to Nick before his mum’s funeral, and now to Ilsa. His family, all of them, the causes of pain and the comforters. 

“No, we – I wouldn’t. I’d never do that, Ils.” 

She brought Janie’s baking stool over from its spot by the pantry and stood on it, so that she was at a proper height for him to bury his head in her neck. They both shook with the weight of his grief. 

“How could she do this to me, Ilsa?” She only squeezed him tighter. The only person with the answers was Robin herself, and Ilsa would be making damn well sure that the woman answered for her cruelty. 

“How could she be so convinced I wasn’t good enough, that she’d uproot her entire life to avoid me? To exclude me?” 

Ilsa sighed from the depths of her soul. “I don’t know why, Corm, but I do know that she was wrong.” She could hear Nick’s footsteps descending the stairs, and she wanted to gesture to him to turn back so that he wouldn’t interrupt Cormoran’s once-a-decade-catharsis, but there was no way to do it without jostling Cormoran himself. 

“She knew they made me nervous, and we’d talked about how I didn’t particularly want any. I told her I was bad at talking to kids. And we all know I had bad role models. But she _always_ told me I was good. Inside. And I would have thought she knew I wouldn’t hurt her, our daughter.” 

He removed his arms from around Ilsa’s back to rub at his eyes, and when he was finished, he saw Nick over her shoulder. “How do you do it, Nick? I need you to teach me.” 

“Teach you how to do what, Oggy?” 

“The fathering. Everything.” 

*** 

Before he fell asleep that night, beleaguered by some bullshit near-hangover he hadn’t realized accompanied human emotion, Cormoran received a text from Robin. 

_I’m unbelievably sorry, Cormoran. I was simply trying to do what was best for you, but after seeing you yesterday, I can see that I made the wrong decision. And I can’t ask you to forgive that. But setting my personal mistakes aside, could we reconcile professionally? I’ve a feeling we’re on the same case, and the Met never was worth its salt without you. – R xx_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry this is a day late! I figured I'd miss a day somewhere, and was pretty sure this would be the day, as this chapter was entirely unwritten to start.  
> Also I'm sorry for the emotional wreckage; I veeerryy nearly cried writing Corm's bit, but this is the last Lewis Capaldi song if that tells you where it's going emotionally from here. 🤪


	18. Same Room

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  _Whoa, boy,_ this is a long one. I had a bunch of bits pre-written, but then as I went to link them together it just kept going... and going... It is my second-favorite (I think!), so I hope you enjoy it!!

_It's hard to summarize three years_

_More like four years_

_Depends where you start counting, It don't matter_

_Everyone wants an explanation. And I don't know what to say anymore_

_I just don't know what to say anymore_

_When we can't even be in the same room_

_My friends are making sure I don't see you_

_I strategize a path to the bathroom_

_So I don't walk past you_

_You leave before the [casework] is finished_

_It's probably for the best that you didn't make us try to fake our way through_

_"Hey, how are you?"_

_We can't even be in the same room_

_\-- Same Room, JP Saxe_

Strike slowly approached the address Robin had texted him, unsure as to why he was so nervous. Too many reasons to lay them out clearly and individually. Was this her house? The fact that it was a residential street supported that conclusion, but then she had continually used plural pronouns when describing the meeting, so it was possible that her partner from the Met lived here instead.

He stood on the tidy semi-detached home’s front walk for a number of minutes, smoking the last of his cigarette. The door opened a metre to his right, grabbing his attention away from a garish garden flag across the street. Upon first glance he saw no one, until he heard the high-pitched voice which came from just below his waist level.

This was his child. His hair, his nose, on a little, tiny, new person. His breath caught.

The moment didn’t last; she opened her mouth. 

“You shouldn’t be playing about with candle lollies, Sir.” She gestured toward her mouth with her tiny fingers, and he realized she must have been referring to his fag. “They’re not a joke and will make you very, very poorly.”

What a tiny twat. He took one last, long drag and ground out the cigarette beneath his foot, not caring that it was in the centre of their pavement.

“Thanks for your opinion, love. I’ll be sure to take it under consideration,” he said drily.

“Would you like to come in?” she asked, not picking up on his displeasure.

He did not want to, but did need to, so he nodded. When she opened the door widely to let him pass, it was to reveal a fuming and faintly mortified Robin, hands on her hips. She gave him a terse, close-lipped smile as he shut the door behind himself before returning her attention to their daughter.

“Melody Grey Ellacott. What have I told you about opening the door to strangers?” With a jolt, Strike realized he had not known the child’s name until now and was surprised to find he rather liked it.

“I shouldn’t.”

“Right. It could have been somebody dangerous, so you need to come tell me or Uncle Petey, and we’ll open the door with you. Alright?”

Strike wondered vaguely who this “Uncle Petey” was. As far as he could remember, the name didn’t belong to any of Robin’s brothers.

Melody nodded. “Yes, mummy, I understand.”

“Good. Now, this is mummy’s friend, Mister Cormoran. Can you say hello?”

Strike supposed he shouldn’t have been surprised that he wasn’t immediately introduced as the girl’s father. It would certainly have been unwise. But it didn’t make the introduction as “mummy’s friend” feel any less wrong. Whatever he was, he wasn’t that.

Their daughter turned to him with a toothy, lopsided grin. “Hiya, Mister Cormanan, my name is Leda!”

Leda? What the hell was Robin thinking? He swallowed, managed to faintly smile back at Leda, and attempted to question Robin with his eyes, but her perturbed focus was elsewhere.

“Thank you, Leda. And can you please apologize for what you said to him outside?”

She looked perplexed. “I was helping.”

“But it’s not polite to tell grown-ups what to do, love,” Robin reminded her gently.

Leda’s bewilderment intensified as it intermingled with crossness. “But _you said_ candle lollies make you poorly!”

Robin sighed. “And they do, love. But sometimes grown-ups know what will happen and they make bad decisions anyways.”

It took all Strike had not to scoff at the accuracy of the statement. If ever there were a perfect summary of what had gone wrong between him and Robin, this was it.

Leda’s frown was nearly comical in its focus and intensity. “I don’t like it,” she declared with tremendous authority as she stomped off. They could hear her complaining to someone in the back of the house, probably the elusive “Uncle Petey,” that “mummy was mean to me because I tried to help Mister Cormanan.”

Robin sighed again and rubbed at the bridge of her nose where a headache was brewing. “Sorry, she's not usually like that.”

Strike didn't know what to say to this, so he simply shrugged. She led him through to the sitting room, and he’d just settled into a love seat in the corner when Switch appeared from the kitchen. Leda was in his arms, her head buried in his neck and faintly shaking.

“Stubborn like her mother,” he commented, his eyes twinkling with mirth. Robin’s deadpan expression indicated she was not amused, though she cracked when Switch concluded, with overdramatic flair as if he’d meant to compliment her all along, and _just_ as caring.” 

Strike chuckled under his breath. 

“Anyway,” Switch continued, “kettle’s just boiled if you want any. I'll put Leda down for the night and then we can get to business?”

Robin hesitated, wondering whether she should apologize to her daughter or whether the girl would have forgotten it all in the morning. Her desire to play it safe eventually won out, and she accepted her grumbling child from Switch’s arms. 

“I got her. Why don’t you two get settled and I’ll join in a bit?”

For one horrified moment as she entered his personal space, Strike wondered whether he’d be subjected to the torture of watching his brother and ex-lover kiss, as the Herberts often did, inexplicably and to their children’s displeasure, during mundane domestic occurrences such as passing one another their wriggling children, kittens, or plates of food. Fortunately, he was spared. She simply collected the child before disappearing down the hall. 

Switch nodded his head in the direction he’d come, which Strike supposed was toward the kitchen. “Tea?”

“Yes, thanks.”

The walls of the kitchen were a buttery yellow that somehow managed not to be garish, and though they were mostly bare, the fridge was entirely covered by crayon drawings, messy watercolours, a dry erase calendar, and the occasional family picture.

It was certainly an interesting glimpse into their life together, and Strike made a mental note to move the kitchen higher up on his exploratory destinations on the farcical loo trips he often made in mark’s houses.

Switch provided him a substantial blue-grey mug with a chip on the handle, and then proceeded to stare at him quizzically as he went through the motions of preparing the tea to his preference. Cormoran shifted uncomfortably and was about to ask the younger man what his problem was when Robin reappeared, and the reasoning was made evident.

“This is why you made me shit tea for a year and a half?”

Strike glanced at the two mugs in front of Switch. One was Robin’s preferred caramel colour, and the other was hardly closer to tea than water. He looked back at his own, the difference in strength between them apparent.

Robin smiled apologetically at his brother as she accepted her mug from him. “Sorry, Petey, old habits die hard.”

He rolled his eyes and muttered good-naturedly under his breath. Cormoran couldn’t figure them out, nor could he tell whether the teasing was the joking banter of siblings or the flirtatious variant of lovers. He’d not had extensive experience doing either for long stints, or so relaxedly.

“Why do you call him Petey?”

All three of them were surprised at the question he wasn’t sure he’d intended to ask. Robin smiled impishly at him. 

“I know _you’ll_ enjoy this.” She punctuated the claim by sticking her tongue out at Switch, which was a playful side of her Strike hadn’t anticipated seeing ever again. 

“This wanker told me it wasn’t a sufficient nickname, despite the fact that he thought he could make Robespierre stick for me. But it’s from Leda and the Swan, I came up with it back when we were at Hendon together.”

“I didn’t know you were into Yeats. Or Greek mythology.”

“Read it during the Laing case,” she replied, and he had the vague awareness that she had likely been looking into his mother’s background when doing so. 

“But his nickname is really the letters P and D, abbreviating for Polydeuces. He thought I was trying to name him after some graceful swan, but you probably remember that the swan was an evil rapist. And Leda’s son with him was named Polydeuces.”

He nodded. It was a good nickname; he’d give her that. 

“That’s actually how I put together that you must be Leda’s dad,” Switch said. “It was a few weeks later when Robin told me she was preggers, because we both needed new roommates and she wanted me to know what I was getting into. She didn’t give much context, but I knew she had to have known you better than she let on if she knew that about our family.”

Cormoran nodded. So Switch did know, then. How could he – Cormoran had always prided himself on not jumping to the obvious conclusion, as it was most often the wrong one. And as much as his betrayal wanted to convince him that they were romantically involved, his brother replacing him in every context, there was the fact that Leda had not called him dad. And Switch said they were roommates. He didn’t mean to be tallying the evidence, but he was.

Evidence. He did his best to redirect his thoughts as well as their evening. “Should we begin on the case, then?” he asked as he cleared his throat and set down his empty mug. 

“Yes, of course,” said Robin. “This table is probably best.”

They had to wait for a moment as Switch sponged the table clean, collecting all of the crumbs into a dustpan. There were notably more at the spot opposite the fridge, which he surmised was where Leda sat.

“Why don’t I start by telling you what I’ve been hired to investigate, and you can tell me what case the Met has opened, and then we’ll compare notes?” Nods all around. 

It turned out that their case objectives and preliminary evidence bases complimented one another well. Cormoran contributed one of the confirmed (and many potential) victims, a confirmed perpetrator, and one of the modes of abduction. Switch and Robin’s case contributed the integrating agency and the mechanism transporting victims around the country.

Most of the case’s once-murky landscape now illuminated, they still needed to nail down the very last specifics that would allow them to swoop in, arrest the traffickers, and free the children.

Switch filled them in on the many suspiciously long rest breaks his van drivers had taken nearby primary schools within and far from London. Cormoran asked a number of follow-up questions, making notes on neighbourhoods and drivers’ names in his notebook.

“I’d found a number of unsolved missing persons cases with a similar pattern. All were latchkey kids, went missing along their route home, and low-income parents accused of selling them into trafficking. Never convicted, but only one kidnapping case was ever reopened. What got my attention was Sacha Livingsby, who I came into your store looking for the other day. She was my client’s nanny, and neighbour to three of the missing children at the time of their disappearance. Overall, the pattern suggests stalking of some kind, like you witnessed, Switch. They knew the routes, the timings, the children to target. Most were around eight at the time they were abducted.”

“Eight?!” Switch asked, appalled. “Who lets an eight-year-old walk home alone?!”

Strike fixed him with a level stare. “People who have no other choice.” The implication hung tensely in the distractingly, now-unfamiliarly Robin-scented air that he had been one of those children, and the differences between the brothers’ upbringings were made uncomfortably, unavoidably, apparent.

“Right. This woman, Sacha, you called her, she’s come in at least four times since I started at F&E, and each time she says she’s bringing in flower girls for the Edgware-Hensby wedding party. Different girls each time, and my trainer Kimberley, who’s been there longest, always swoops in instantly to make sure she does their fittings. I think she may be involved? And Holly, the other colleague, was filling me in on all the company gossip and it seems there’s an exec with the surname Hensby. I’ve done some digging, only public records stuff, and he does own a large flat near Edgware Road, but it’s not listed as his primary residence, which is in Battersea. It seemed off to me that he’d have a home in Westminster and live elsewhere, so I’m planning to hang about near there when I’m not scheduled in to the showroom this week and see what I find.”

She paused for Cormoran to finish writing. “But also, I talked to one of the girls she brought in on my first day, and I think she may have been your client’s daughter. Sophia, red hair?”

Cormoran nodded. “That’s her.”

“The same girl I told you to look out for from the car park?” Switch asked. Robin agreed.

“Wait. You saw her in the car park?” Cormoran began rummaging through the leather satchel he’d brought, which Robin hadn’t seen before. He pulled out a laptop and plugged in a thumb drive.

“Once I followed her to … Forever and Everywhere, was it? Once I’d followed her there, and Robin said she came in often, I put Spanner on trying to hack the CCTV. He just sent it yesterday, and I haven’t got time to look through it yet, but he mentioned something off about two girls in a car park.”

“Here, come back through and we can put that on the telly to see it bigger.”

The move would have been worse than useless with Strike’s small and grainy television screen (and he reckoned not even possible), but Switch and Robin’s telly was far shinier and more substantial. He watched as his brother plugged the USB into a port on the side of the screen with no trouble, and Robin flipped through to the proper input settings. They both settled onto the sofa, not terribly far apart, as Strike reacquainted himself with the armchair in the corner.

The screen showed a crisp image of Sacha Livingsby paying for parking in the zone reserved for the rooftop restaurant, holding tightly to the hand of the redheaded girl. Not long after, from a different camera angle, they saw another girl – the one who had accompanied them in the shop, Robin realised – entered the car park from the street level, wearing a primary school uniform. She navigated confidently, as if she traversed the underground concrete structure on a daily basis (to spend her after-school hours with a parent who worked there, Strike wondered?), through the winding aisles of cars to the lifts. Minutes later, footage showed the blonde woman accompanying both girls, the brunette no longer clad in her school clothes but in the dress Robin had seen her wear to the shop. 

The last scene they watched showed Sacha Livingsby returning to her car alone and exiting the car park. Robin switched the telly off, and they sat in silence for a moment.

“I hate it. I know it’s what happens, and it’s our job to be able to deal with it, but watching her before, and then seeing her in the store immediately after and knowing that if I’d realised then – well, it would have ruined my cover but I could have gotten them out. And there’s such shitty people in the world and we can think we have safe plans and arrangements and neighbourhoods, but we don’t and I hate it.” 

Having been lost in his own, not dissimilar thoughts, Strike was surprised when he looked over to find that Robin had leaned back against Switch’s chest and was wiping away angry tears. 

“It’s so bizarre to see the two of you together.” The words weren’t meant to escape, not least during a moment which had been sombre in honour of the girls they still needed to save. Strike pushed on. “I fed you and changed your nappies, Switch. And Robin, I – You’re just two very different parts of my life, and I didn’t expect you to intersect in this way.”

Robin glanced at him, perceiving the confusion he didn’t show. “I didn’t realise how much you actually raised him, before you left for Oxford.” 

Strike shrugged, never one to talk about the things he did for others, and not least for his mother, whom he didn’t like to remember needed to be covered for often. 

“That explains why he feels like my brother, then.” After a minute, she cleared her throat and added, “He’s a wonderful uncle.”

“Thanks, Robs.” Switch held his hand up for a soft fist bump, his position behind her putting it at an odd angle from her. She laughed as she twisted to reach it. 

“Solid team, we are.”

Despite a faint lightness he felt at the realisation they weren't romantically involved, Cormoran was in no mind to hear more about this “solid team” for which he’d not made the cut. He was beginning to make his apologies when Leda reappeared. His solar plexus panged at the unfamiliar sight which would have been uncharacteristic for him to describe as adorable, but which was no less sweet for his resistance to categorise it as such.

She had a plushie under one arm and rubbed her eyes blearily as she toddled over to her mother. She climbed onto Robin’s lap and whispered something in her ear, then situated herself cosily into against her breastbone, her height fitting perfectly in the nook between chin and lap.

Robin winced and wiped some spittle from the side of her face. Leda was still getting the hang of whispering, though she had finally improved to the level that her whispers weren’t audible to everyone in the room. Quite certain Leda was only out of bed because they had a guest, as she always wanted to be part of the action and excitement of such things (she was also a bit of an attention hog, though they tried not to spoil her), Robin declined her request for a glass of milk. It would only lead to a later trip out of bed for the potty, and Robin didn’t relish that slippery slope of a game. 

She expected a bit of pouting at the denial, but Leda suddenly bounded out of her arms to kneel at the floor in front of Cormoran’s armchair. Robin rubbed at her sternum, off of which Leda had unwittingly levered herself quite forcefully. Her thoughts of its potential to bruise left her when Leda pulled at the hem of Cormoran’s pants where his metallic right ankle was just barely visible and gasped.

Fucking bugger, Robin could _not_ deal with two rude offenses in one night, and not against _him._

Leda was bubbling with excitement but had always been one of those children who teared up when overcome with any emotion, good or bad. She swiped at her eyes with balled fists, and whispered reverently, “Are you my car?”

“Wot?” Cormoran was not expecting the question, and he’d thought he’d heard every oddball response there was about amputees, from cloying overconcern to mocking jokes to confusion.

“My car,” she began, but was gently interrupted by her somewhat-relieved mother.

“The Land Rover,” Robin interjected helpfully.

“Yes, m’-car-the-Lan’-Rover, he was very old and poorly so we ‘ad to leave ‘im behind grampa’s barn. But then he was sad, cos he missed me, so he became a transformer and – and he walked all the way to London to see me and ‘e had my batgirl sticker book I left with him!”

She paused for a moment so that everyone could share in her joy. “And _you’re_ a transformer! May I have my sticker book, please?”

Fortunately, he’d gotten better over the years at thinking quickly on his feet for a cover. “I’m sorry, love, I think I left it in one of the roadside services on my way from Yorkshire. I’ll find it for you, though.”

This pacified his child, who clapped her hands. “Thank you, Mister Cormanan!” There, to Robin’s relief, were the earlier-forgotten manners she’d worked so hard to instil.

Cormoran wasn’t one to give much consideration to a child’s manners, except in extreme cases of impropriety and assholery, so his own thoughts strayed far from Robin’s. Though he hadn’t thought of the car in years, Cormoran realized suddenly and with immense surprise that he’d wanted it to be functional, functional so that one day, if he and Robin were reunited – they could relive their past memories with it.

“Well, we should probably be getting you back into bed, Little Leda, before the tickle monster wakes up!” Switch warned, approaching his niece with waggling fingers. 

Leda shrieked but allowed herself to be picked up like a sack of potatoes. “Mummy, save me!” she protested.

“What am I, chopped liver? I’m the one saving you, silly girl, by making sure you’re asleep by the time the monster comes back.”

“No, Uncle Petey,” she giggled. “You _are_ the monster!”

They could hear his responses of mock-offense as they disappeared further down the hall. Cormoran couldn’t help but stare after them, wondering to some extent what role he would have played – or could, now – in that picture of domestic silliness, partnership, and reliability.

He moved to stand. “Well, I should get going, too, it’ll be a long day tomorrow gathering the evidence to support this.”

Robin nodded and led him back to the door. He’d assumed she meant only to lock it behind him, but once he’d descended the single step onto their front walk, she called after him.

“Cormoran?”

He turned, finding himself eye-to-eye with her as she stood on the elevated stoop. 

“I can’t ask you, ever, to forgive me. I know that. But I can tell you I’m very, very unspeakably sorry. Both to you and to her.”

She hugged him then, her left arm coming over his right shoulder and her chin tucked into his left. Her right arm pressed his left to their bodies, and though he could feel both of her hands digging into and gripping the material of his navy blazer-cut cardigan, his own hands didn’t move. He was frozen, unreciprocative. He could feel, just like in their very first hug, the myriad words hanging thickly between them, but this time he wasn’t certain the ones radiating off of him were particularly nice.


	19. Too Young

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The song of this chapter is Too Young by Louis Tomlinson. Obviously Cormoran and Robin weren't "too young" in numbers when their relationship ended, but I think if you replace "young" with "inexperienced in mature, emotionally healthy relationships," the sentiment of the song fits them in this fic so well!
> 
> Also, "inexperienced in mature, emotionally healthy relationships" has such a good ring to it, idk why they didn't put such a catchy, succinct lyric in the song... 🤪

_It’s hard to think you could ever hate me_

_But everything's feeling different now..._

_So I cut you off 'cause I didn't know no better_

_Now I realize, yeah, I realize_

_We were too young to know we had everything_

_Too young, I wish I could've seen it all along_

_I'm sorry that I hurt you, darling, no, oh_

_We were too young_

_\-- Too Young, Louis Tomlinson_

Only a couple of days after Cormoran’s visit, on what happened to be Robin’s last day undercover at F&E, Switch and Tiffany secured a flat to be moved into in two weeks’ time. They debated about when and how to tell Leda. 

Should Tiffany be present? (They eventually decided not, lest Leda see her as an antagonist and get upset with her.) Should they sweeten her up with extra pud? (Robin rejected this one of Switch’s suggestions, as they normally only had dessert on Fridays and Saturdays, and she worried – likely unnecessarily – that Leda would associate surprises and treats with negative consequences in the future.) Should they wait until nearly the last possible moment, to spare her the pain of anticipation, or give her ample time to acclimate to the idea?

For simplicity’s sake, Robin finally suggested they tell her at dinner the next day after Switch received the news, which was Wednesday. Not only would the lack of over-consideration hopefully minimise the unique characteristics of the event and potential associations for Leda, but it would also mean fewer decisions for Switch and Robin, and thus fewer opportunities for regret.

Wednesday dinner came more rapidly than Robin would have liked. After Leda finished telling them about her day at school, Switch cleared his throat.

“I have something to tell you, Leda,” he said solemnly.

She looked up. “You love me?” 

It was said with all of the confidence of a child who knew, from practice and a feeling of comfort with the situation, that they were correct.

“Yes. Always, little one. But there’s something else, too.”

“Oh, okay.” She didn’t seem particularly perturbed at having been wrong; she didn’t consider that she was.

“I’m going to start living with Auntie Tiffany in a couple of weeks.”

Leda looked puzzled. “Where will Auntie Tiffany sleep?”

Robin frowned. “Uncle Petey and Auntie Tiffany will have their own house, and just you and me will live here.”

Leda turned to look at Switch. “You _can’t,_ ” she said seriously. “We’re _family!”_

“You don’t always live with everyone in your family, love,” Robin said gently. “Uncle Martin is family, and he doesn’t live with us.”

Leda’s bottom lip quivered as her eyes filled with tears. “But we _never_ see Uncle Martin!” she shrieked. She turned her sobbing face to Switch, pleading. “I _need_ you, Uncle Petey. Right _here.”_

He reached out to her, but having apparently changed her mind, she shook her head and hurled herself into Robin’s arms. Her neck was instantly sopping from the girl’s tears. She held her tight, lips pressed to her head. She half-smiled at Switch, who was crying himself. 

“It’s not your fault,” she whispered, the words meant for both of them. Mainly Switch. It was bound to happen eventually.

***

Thursday morning, Cormoran visited New Scotland Yard to deliver and piece together the last bits of evidence he’d collected for the F&E human trafficking case. If all went to plan, the bust would occur that afternoon to arrest the traffickers and save the children.

It was a welcome relief to enter the building freely, without concern for whether Robin may work there or whether he may stumble upon her. No, he now knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that she was on the premises, and he could guess reasonably well what would be said in such an encounter.

He was surprised at the slight frisson of almost-happiness he felt behind his sternum, poking gently like a fire iron into long-dead, chilling embers when he saw her. It was nothing compared to the hot-air-balloon-fuel joy he’d once felt upon seeing her return from a soggy surveillance or open her eyes first thing in the morning. He wasn’t happy, per se. He didn’t exactly want to be her best friend. But there was the mild, expectant pleasure at the sight of her, like seeing the postman when you’d been awaiting an important letter, or a friend at whose house you’d forgotten your favourite jumper.

Robin, Switch, and an unfamiliar woman who was introduced as Evan Jemison, a superior in their division, were standing around a cosy kitchen-like nook which appeared to serve as the floor’s break room. 

“Fancy a tea, Cormoran?” Robin invited him into their circle. He nodded as he approached.

She spread her arms wide in a gesture to the wall behind her, where a dozen or so mismatched mugs hung on iron hooks by their handles. “Pick a mug, then, any mug.”

He gestured toward a relatively normal-looking navyish one. 

“Right choice, mate. Robs always goes for the wacky ones that look like they didn’t make the cut when someone was moving house twenty years ago.”

Strike laughed as he accepted his mug from Robin, noting that his and Switch’s were the only matching pair out of the bunch. Robin’s was lime green and had an image of a frowning cactus sitting in a rowboat in the middle of open water. He wondered whether it was meant to be sad because it was a succulent and didn’t want that much water, or because it didn’t have any arms to row the boat.

“Jemison, this is Cormoran Strike, my old business partner and Petey’s brother. Cormoran, this is Evan Jemison.”

They shook hands, and Evan introduced the topic of conversation they’d been discussing before he arrived: her incompetent trainee. Apparently, they’d been on a case the day before and upon stumbling across drug paraphernalia, he’d asked whether they should call the police to report it.

Jemison’s partner, Schmidt, had apparently not used as much grace as he could’ve in reminding the boy that they _were_ the police. The whole group was in stitches by the time she finished the story.

Jemison’s watch beeped. “That’s me off, then. Good to meet you, Strike.”

He waved good-naturedly as she exited. 

“I miss having meetings,” Robin said wistfully, looking after Jemison.

“What are you on? Worst part of the job, hands down,” Switch disagreed.

“But after being a shop assistant for weeks – it’s like part of real life we didn’t have. Normalcy. Ideas, tasks, awkward-as-hell icebreakers. Love ‘em. Plus, I feel like a useless bump on a log today. I’ve not got anything to do since we haven’t been in, and all my closeout meetings for the case were moved to tomorrow because Jennifer’s on leave today.”

“Speak for yourself.”

She eyed Switch jealously. “What have you got?”

“Lunch plans.” He smiled coyly, and she laughed. He would be visiting The Feathers, and not for what was on the front of house menu.

“Tell her I said hi, yeah?”

“Yep.”

Cormoran cleared his throat, and they turned their grinning faces to him in unison like caught-out schoolchildren. “If you’re not busy, I’m meeting with my client, Sophia’s mum, in an hour. You can come if you like, you are the one who found her.”

He knew that as much as Robin loved detecting for the detecting itself, investing in clients’ lives and setting things aright was important to her.

The invitation meant a lot to Robin; one of the things she missed most about private practice was the interaction with clients. The greater emotional distance from the individuals her work helped did make sense with situations as tricky and cases as large as the Met’s, but it could be disheartening sometimes.

“I would love to. You’re sure?”

He nodded. Switch surveyed the two of them before moving to wash his mug at the small sink, mentioning he didn’t need to be late. He kissed Robin’s cheek and gave his brother a clap on the back on his way out.

“Let me get our mugs sorted and we can be on our way as well?”

He nodded and drained the dregs of his tea before passing her the empty vessel. Realising she was about to open her mouth and fearing it was simply out of a need to fill the silence, he interjected. The old Robin never needlessly filled a silence, but then their old pauses had never been so froid and stilted.

“I want to be part of Leda’s life. Regularly.” He wondered only belatedly whether it was an inappropriate subject to broach in a public area of the office, not having experienced the delicacies of discussing his child at work nor of having so many co-workers and office politics.

She nodded, pouring suds from one mug into the other and then rinsing the first. 

“After the other night, I figured you might. I had hoped it, actually. You could always come over for dinner whenever, being in the routine may help to… you know. Establish you as a home person, a parent figure. Or if you’d rather we could start with fun things, outings: the park, ice creams; she really likes the Discover Centre.” 

She became aware she was rambling and stopped suddenly. “Anything, really. Whatever you want.” She tugged at the high neck of her blouse with her still-sudsy left hand, breathing shallowly.

He appraised her as she towelled and hung the mugs. “Alright. Yeah. Sounds good.”

Robin was pleased to find he still worked at Denmark Street. She’d feared yet another developer would have bought out the building and forced a move since their last days together in the co-working space.

Barclay was there, sitting at her old desk talking to a woman who was sitting on what appeared to be a reupholstered version of the farting sofa. Robin wondered vaguely whether the new light-grey cloth covering prevented it from emitting the obscene noises of yore, and who had suggested the change which felt decidedly un-Cormoran. Barclay was regaling the woman with tales of his wife’s pregnancy problems. 

Robin laughed, unthinking. “God, yeah. There were so many muscles I didn’t even know I had until my bump stretched them out and they ached like hell.”

Strike looked pained, his head snapping immediately to where Robin was standing less than a foot in front of him. 

“You’ve a kid?” Barclay asked, his surprise apparent. 

Robin nodded and produced her phone to display her daughter on its home screen, grinning atop a pony in Yorkshire the past summer. “Leda, she’s nearly four.”

“Wow, congratulations.” He looked at his distracted boss once more. “To you both?”

Strike smiled faintly, he realized for the first time in response to his daughter’s being brought up in a conversation.

“Yeah. Thanks mate.”

He turned, then, to the woman on the couch and gestured over his shoulder to the inner office. “Shall we go through, Clodagh?”

After Clodagh had sufficiently depleted the box of facial tissues on Strike’s desk, seen the payment of her final invoice soundly rejected, and given Strike and Robin each what felt like a dozen teary hugs, Cormoran and Robin sat in an exhausted silence.

“What time are you needed back?” he asked, running a hand through his curls and leaning precariously back in his desk chair.

Robin eyed him wearily from her spot in one of the cosy guest chairs in the corner, repeating his motion through her longer strawberry locks. “What day is it, even?”

“Thursday.” 

“Right then. Petey will have taken Leda from her creche to the gymnastics club, where I’m meant to collect her at four.”

“Fancy an early afternoon pint, then?”

She smiled and they made their way, wading through nostalgia as thick as gelatine – or at least it felt as such to Robin – to the Tottenham, which was now called the Flying Horse Pub. Yet another reminder of all of the things she had missed, the years she’d been gone.

He made a concerted effort to keep conversation casual and impersonal through their first round. As she returned with a second wine for herself and another pint of Doom Bar for him, he asked, seemingly without preamble, “Was Matthew a tit about Leda?”

“God, yeah. The worst. He’d always thought you and I were… well. He saw her as proof, I s’pose, that I’d been up to his sorts of shenanigans.” She stopped and swallowed, seemingly weighing her next words.

“Always judging people by their bloody selves.”

“What?”

He cleared his throat. “You said that, the night you’d first learned he’d cheated, when I took you to Hazlitt’s. ‘Always judging people by their bloody selves,’ and I’d thought that was what you meant, but you wouldn’t say.”

She should have been done being impressed by his ability for recollection, but it still amazed.

“Well. His character was consistent, I’ll give him that at least. Should have seen all along… He sent his dad to the church the day I had Leda christened, to stand up and protest as if it were a wedding where they ask people’s opinions! Said you can’t christen a child with just one parent and went on about her being born out of wedlock… it was mortifying.”

“Shit, Robin, I’m sorry.”

“Not your fault the Cuntliffes live up to their name.” After a pause, she added, “Shouldn’t have even had her christened in the first place. It’s not like we’re terribly churchy people, and in that regard, he wasn’t necessarily wrong, I guess.”

“Why did you, then?”

“I dunno. Stephen and Jenny were, and mum suggested we have a joint service, and I do feel a _little_ bad about all the shit she gets for me in her supper club, not that I would change myself for it, just. She… I wanted to do one thing the ‘by the book’ way, just once, for her. Not that it helped, likely.” She snorted. 

“Switch is her godfather, by the way. Hope you don’t…”

“Hope I don’t mind? Bit late to ask my opinion now, isn’t it?”

“Yeah. Sorry.” He shrugged and grimaced in a way that didn’t imply forgiveness per se, but rather an acknowledgement of the mutual undesirability and unchangeability of the situation.

“He really has been great. The best nonparental coparent I could have had.” She trailed off, worrying her lip and looking overall disappointed. “He’s moving in with his girlfriend week after next, and I’m really excited for them, but it’s going to be a big adjustment trying to get all of her things sorted around work time. Having been partners at work, we’ve been quite spoilt as we can nearly always cover for one another to get everything covered.”

He eyed her. Gone was the Robin of the past it seemed, who always swept difficulties large and small under the rug, handling them capably, gracefully, and above all secretly. He wondered whether this change was due to greater self-awareness or diminished confidence, or possibly a desire to fill the silence that stretched between them like poster gum. Hopefully the former. This Robin seemed less likely to break down on a motorway verge, so the change was probably for the better.

He was surprised to find himself offering a place back at the agency, and yet more surprised to find he didn’t immediately regret it.

“D’you mean that?”

“Surprisingly, yeah. You’re still the best partner I’ve ever had.” 

To Robin’s great mortification, the affirmation caused her to tear up. She dabbed at her eyes with the bar napkin that had been served under her wine. An unseen dribble of white wine caused it to sting peskily. 

“You’re still my best, too, Cormoran,” she said throatily. It was punctuated with a hiccough. 

“Wish I’d not …” She started again. “Sorry that I… expanded my horizons.”

“Damn horizons.”

She nodded clumsily. 

“Right, let’s get you a glass of water so we don’t look like the town drunks when we pick Leda up from gymnastics.”

She looked up in hopeful excitement. “You’re coming along?”

“Yes, Robin. I’m along for the ride, now.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hahaha I very nearly poured some wine on a tissue to see whether it genuinely would sting on my eye, but then I decided a) that is way too far to go in the sake of accuracy for a fanfic, b) it is a waste of wine, c) it actually may really hurt so I got scared??, and d) *hopefully* none of you would know from experience! So I just assumed that it would, like rubbing alcohol does on a cut but lessened to varying degrees depending on the wine since the alcohol content is lower...  
> If you unfortunately do have experience let me know, I guess!


	20. No Right to Love You

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry, I know I'd planned to have this up Thursday, but it was a bit of a sad day and I wasn't in much of a writing mood. And then it was somewhat difficult to get the emotions in this one just right to bridge those of the last chapter with those of the next. I'm trying to make it realistic, slow and steady enemies-to-lovers (lol) transition, but after rereading the last chapter, I don't think it came across as friendly as I intended. Oops!  
> Anyway, enjoy!! Hopefully the length of this one makes up for the delay :)

_Time pushed me to the edge,_

_The jump was my decision_

_I've only got myself to blame..._

_And you deserve to be put first_

_I had to let you go_

_I have no right to love you_

_When I chose to walk away_

_I have no right to miss you_

_When I didn't wanna stay_

_And I have no right to need you_

_And I knew what my heart was gonna lose_

_To ask if you're okay_

_When I left you so confused_

_I have no right to love you_

_But I still do._

_\--- Rhys Lewis, No Right to Love You_

From the night he saw Robin and Leda home from gymnastics, and with increased frequency after Switch’s blessedly uneventful move, Cormoran began to come over a couple of nights per week to get to know Leda better. It was initially awkward and stilted, particularly between the adults, but as Little Leda was unaware of the tension, she often lifted the mood and carried their silly conversations.

Father and daughter got on well, helped by the fact that Leda’s batgirl sticker book had arrived in the post from Linda soon after he began coming over, and Robin had given it to him to give to her. As far as he knew, she was still under the impression that he was a transformer version of the Land Rover.

Robin had turned in her notice to the Met soon after Cormoran offered her the job and partnership she’d quit years before. As she’d just closed a big case and had only been responding to short calls in the wake of it, it wasn’t a difficult transition. She did feel somewhat bad that the move fell only days after Petey’s and thus severed the second stream of consistent contact between them.

Working together again had been a net good for both Cormoran and Robin. It was cold and impersonal sometimes, as it had been in the year following her marriage. But that did little to impede the fact that their minds worked as harmoniously together as the two wheels of a bicycle. So professionally, it was good. And it was wonderful to see Barclay and Hutchins again, and to get to know the newest subcontractor Cormoran had brought on board a year before, Ana.

Presently it was a Saturday morning, for which Leda seemed to have a lie-in preventing radar that ensured she woke up a solid hour earlier than their normal weekday routine. As they’d done last week, Strike had arrived around eight and stayed with Leda while Robin did her weekly shop. She’d now begun asking his input on her dinner menus and ensured she bought his favourite biscuits and crisps to have on hand for snacking around the house. Abandoning most of the vegetarian entrees she liked was a small price to pay for the opportunity to shop alone.

Grocery shopping with a now-four-year-old was a unanimously miserable adventure, particularly as the closest store could never be relied on to have an adequate supply of the buggies with child seats. Most such outings ended with at least three snack items already opened to pacify Leda throughout. Her nose wasn’t the only thing she’d inherited from her father, it turned out. 

Robin had been concerned about leaving Cormoran alone with Leda – not that he was incapable, but that she feared she was taking advantage by using him as something akin to a free childminder. He’d said he enjoyed the bonding time and had assured her in no uncertain terms that it was impossible to babysit your own children. That was one of his least favourite of Greg’s vocabulary words.

How wrong she’d been, years ago. She’d spend their lives making it up to him.

In opposition to the feelings and opinions he wanted to have, Cormoran was somewhat enjoying PAW Patrol. The sense of justice and individual courage they were instilling in the next generation was admirable, and something Cormoran found comfortingly familiar due to his own work.

Just as Skye was about to save the day, Leda started talking. He resisted the urge to hush her and instead looked down to his lap where he saw her clear blue-grey eyes smiling fondly up at him.

“I think you need a nickname, Mister Cormanan,” she announced without any acknowledgment of where the idea had arisen. 

Seemingly in a mind to put her plan into action, she continued, “Mummy is good at nicknames. She called me Leda but really I’m called Melody, and she called Uncle Petey, Petey, for… well…” She trailed off, looking puzzled as Switch’s given name had apparently never occurred to her, or faded from memory due to disuse. “For Petey,” she concluded with authority.

Leda curled back into Cormoran’s side, seemingly still watching her cartoon, then sat up to look at him once more just as Robin entered the room from where she’d been putting the groceries away in the kitchen.

“Mister Cormanan?”

“Yes, love?”

“Could I nickname you Dad? Uncle Petey told me my dad is a very nice man, and I think you’re a very nice person.”

He swiped his thumb and forefinger under each eye toward the bridge of his nose to pinch away the traitorous tears.

“I’d like that very much, Little Leda.” His chest shook a little. Leda, having inherited her father’s instincts for detecting others’ feelings and her mother’s empathic heart, was outwardly troubled by this result.

“Why are you crying, Mister Dad? ‘S not like brushing your teeth or nothing, you don’t have to just cos I said so.”

He suspected this was a parenting line she’d picked up from Robin, given the mock authority with which it was delivered.

“No, I’d love to be your dad, my love.”

It was long minutes before she responded, and in fact until he heard the soft whisper, he’d thought she’d fallen asleep.

“I love you, Mister Dad.”

He and Robin never agreed, despite years of ribbing debate on the matter, which of them had whimper-squeaked in that moment. Truthfully, he suspected it was he, but wouldn’t ever admit it.

He left shortly after lunch, when Leda went down for her afternoon nap. As he bundled into his signature wool coat and Robin waited by the door to see him out, he eyed her.

“I was planning to ask today when you’d be ready to tell Leda I’m her dad,” he said.

“Don’t know we need to, she sure seems to’ve put two and two together.”

“She’s the detective.” Strike smiled faintly as he completed her line from long ago. 

“Not that she could very well resist it, being ours. It’s in her blood.”

She smiled widely, the pride in her heart expressed openly in the smile lines that were beginning to etch more permanently into the corners of her eyes.

“Yeah. She is.”

***

The next day, Cormoran was back at a slightly more palatable hour of the morning. He and Leda had a day at the park planned – he’d promised to push her on the swings – and Robin was off to brunch with Ilsa. (To apologize for lying to her face for years, he presumed, but he needn’t meddle.)

He hadn’t planned, exactly, to jump into fatherhood so quickly. Well, if one were to discuss his plans, fatherhood wouldn’t have a received a passing mention, save for possibly in the negative. But upon discovering he was a father, he hadn’t thought he’d be seeing his daughter or her mother on a nearly daily basis.

Most days, he wondered what the fuck he was doing. But it had finally stopped smarting and stinging, the bruise of Robin’s excluding him, lying, and leaving. 

He knew she had always seen the best in the world and tried to bring it about, and he could see in the way she mothered that she was starting this mission from Leda’s heart outward. And he could see in her work that she was trying to build the best world for Leda, too, forcing it with sheer determination and sharp compassion into order, goodliness, and safety. 

He could have seen this as an affront, further evidence that he was not a part of that ordered, good, and safe world that their daughter deserved. But that wasn’t the truth.

The truth was clear in the way Robin jumped at any opportunity to allow him and Leda to bond, but then stepped cautiously back, worried of overburdening him.

Save for the first time she’d asked whether he was comfortable being alone with her – a valid question, she knew he didn’t have four years’ full-time experience – her questions had never again assessed his competence or comfort or commitment with any particular task or responsibility.

She only ever asked whether he _wanted_ to do things. Always when Leda was distracted, or over text or at work when she wasn’t present, so that there would be no pressure to accept or fear disappointing her. He could tell by the worried set of Robin’s eyes when she asked that _this_ was the thing she was wary – fearful, even – of misjudging.

But he’d only turned them down once, for an evening of surveillance he’d forgotten to add to the office diary.

At first his zealousness had stemmed from a desire to disprove her disbelief in him. By the time he was confident of her claims to have acted only out of concern for his interests and life plans, Leda had won him over, which had admittedly not taken long at all. Their first conversation notwithstanding, she was more of a joy to be around than any other child he’d known.

Robin had done an excellent job raising her, and Leda had little bits of each of their personalities and physicalities that were endlessly fascinating to uncover as they made themselves known. The fact that he’d brushed up on his kid conversation skills with his niece Leda Fantoni and the Herbert children over the intervening years – almost since her birth, unwittingly – probably helped, too.

Despite the progress with Leda, his friendship with Robin was at a stalemate. He’d always known her able to charm anyone into feeling like her best friend in mere minutes, but she was distant now. There were warm moments, joking or nicknaming clients or snacking or hitting breakthroughs at the office, or at her home smiling at one another over Leda’s curly-topped head or across the dining table. But gone was the steady camaraderie they’d once had, and he didn’t know how to regain it. 

He wondered, sometimes, whether she was awaiting a scolding. The apprehension was there when he opened his mouth abruptly, and when he left each evening and she followed to lock the door behind him. Her shoulders raised to house her bated breath.

A worry for another day, though. Tube delays meant he’d be arriving just as Robin was intended to leave.

She was in fact putting on jewellery and lipstick at the mirror over the table in the foyer when he arrived and smiled at him by way of her reflection, which faced the front door. He’d ceased knocking, having been given a key the week before.

“Sorry. Tube delays.”

“No problem. As you can see, I wasn’t quite ready, either. Good morning?”

“Yeah, not bad. You?”

“Good, good. Leda’s excited to see you; talked about it all night.” She paused to focus on her earring fastenings.

“One minute, she’s just in her room. Leda, love!” She adjusted her voice to project farther, but from the diaphragm, so that it didn’t adopt an ear-splitting timbre. “Daddy’s here!”

Leda slid down the last bit of the hallway in her stocking feet, receiving a warning glance from her mother.

This did not stop Leda. Unconcerned, she bounded over to Cormoran and hugged his legs. He stooped to hug her, which was a bit of an awkward position that forced more back-patting than proper hugging, but it was much easier on his knee than squatting to her level for a proper hug.

“Are you ready for the park, love?”

“Yes, Mister Dad! I can’t wait for the swings; you’re going to push me so high that I’ll be flying!”

Cormoran smiled fondly. “I can’t wait, too. Should you go get your jacket?”

She ran off, on a mission. 

“Give mummy a kiss,” Robin said when Leda returned. Unlike Cormoran, she was able to squat and did so to receive a sloppy kiss on each cheek. She tucked the collar of Leda’s coat, which had gotten rucked under from being donned in a haste. 

“You’ll be a good girl for your dad, won’t you?”

Leda nodded. Robin smiled and kissed her forehead. Upon standing, she was in closer proximity to Cormoran than she’d expected and wondered what the proper goodbye was for him. She was far enough into his personal space that to back up would have felt rude, but what was less personal? A hug or a kiss on the cheek? A handshake would have been insultingly formal, and a pat on the back or shoulder or arm would have come across as pitying, not to mention fucking weird.

Cormoran solved her evident dilemma by leaning in and kissing the air beside her right ear.

“Give Ilsa my love.”

“Yeah, I will do.” Her voice was breathier than she would’ve liked.

Cormoran and Leda had been at the park for only half an hour or so, having exhausted the appeal of the swing set and walking toward the ice cream van when, with great alarm, she stepped back and let go of his hand to crane her neck and look up at his face.

“Oh no, Mister Dad, where are your candle lollies?”

“You said they would make me poorly, so I didn’t bring them.” 

And it was neither an easy decision nor one he’d been pleased about, but something in the way Leda had been so deeply concerned without knowing the social connotations of his smoking – in fact, she seemingly didn’t even know the cigarettes’ proper name – made him more desirous of not disappointing her. He’d been initially pissed, the night he first met Leda, at “fucking Robin for turning his child against him,” but time and experience with the two of them had mellowed him. It was still annoying, in an ironic way, that Robin was the only woman who didn’t want to change him and had still managed to be the only one that bloody did. He’d been happy before, dammit.

“Oh no, but mummy said b’cos you’re a transformer you need them, from how when you were me car you needed petrol. Now you’ll _really_ be poorly.” She was distraught almost to the point of tears, and Cormoran had no idea what to do. 

Should he tell her he wasn’t a transformer? But she’d been so pleased that he was; he feared telling her this may disappoint her even more. Could he say that he didn’t need them anymore without making her mother look like a liar? Bloody Robin, telling Leda fucking inconvenient, contradicting lies and not warning him on any of them. 

“I can, erm, I can go a ways without them. Good mileage,” he finally managed.

She seemed pleased enough by this result, though it likely helped that they arrived shortly after at the ice cream van. She told him truly horrible kids’ jokes as they ate their cones. Most of the punch lines made absolutely no sense, being complete non-sequiturs from the introductions of the jokes, but her gleeful giggles made it easy to laugh along as if her jokes were the funny part. He tried to be proactive in wiping the melting chocolate that streamed down her chin and wrists, but she laughed and dodged him each time, as if he were trying to tickle her. 

“We need to get you home so that you won’t be sticky by the time your mummy gets there.”

He’d expected her to whine as Luke or Leda Fantoni would’ve, but she was good-natured. “Okie. Thank you for my ice cream, Mister Dad.”

He tugged her little ponytail gently. “You’re welcome, Little Leda.”

They were most of the way back to Robin’s house and Cormoran was mentally congratulating himself on how well the outing had gone when Leda tripped over a crack in the sidewalk. Her tights tore over her right knee, which began bleeding almost instantly, and he could see that both of her palms were scabbing. He scooped her up against his chest, making gentle shushing noises he hoped were comforting, and walked a couple of houses down the street until the one he could see had a conveniently placed garden wall with a wide ledge at his waist height.

He set her upon it and first dried her tears with his thumbs, then began wiping at her bloody knee with a clean looking napkin he’d found in his coat pocket. The scrapes didn’t look deep, fortunately. But she was still wailing, attracting the attention of an increasing number of sympathetic passers-by. Though unsurprising, it did hurt Strike that it was Robin she cried for, none of his hugs or comforting words doing anything to soothe her desire for her mother.

It was entirely possible Leda would have been a mummy’s girl no matter what; Strike would certainly endorse without offense the fact that Robin was an objectively more appealing individual than he, but he nonetheless felt a momentary flash of resentment toward her for robbing him of the opportunity to be the parent Leda craved when she was hurt, or had night terrors, or just wanted a cuddle.

He did his best not to jostle her still whimpering form while he reached into his pocket and unlocked Robin’s front door. He set her down on the sofa and dialled Robin’s mobile to see where she kept her first aid kit, making soothing noises to Leda and running his hand through her drooping ponytail all the while.

The phone stopped ringing, but Robin didn’t answer his hello. It seemed like it may have answered in her pocket or handbag, because he could hear her talking and Ilsa’s sympathetic noises and comments. 

“It feels like a cover, sometimes,” she was saying. “It was like this when she was a newborn; I don’t know if you felt that way – probably not, you had wanted and prepared and looked forward to it for so long, but I felt like, at every turn, I was asking myself, ‘what would Robin-the-mum do?’ as if she wasn’t me. It was like I was playing a part; I ask myself the same questions when I’m undercover as Venetia or Rosy or Bobbi or whatever role I am for work. ‘What would she do here? What would she wear, what’s her favourite song, what would she say?’

“And I finally got to where mum-Robin was just Robin, just me; I’m sure you can relate that it’s sometimes _too_ much of me, you start to ask where just-Robin is. But now it’s all over again, what would Partner-Robin do, or say, or offer or ask of Cormoran? I can’t be like I once was with him. He won’t say it, but I know he must be angry for how I treated him. He’s kind, and good with Leda, and we have laughs sometimes and still work well together. But that doesn’t change the fact that I ruined his life five years ago by leaving him, four years ago by having his child, every day since by lying to him, and for the past month by shoving him into a role he never wanted. I can’t ask him to love me, and I don’t know how to settle into just liking him, or even whether he does like me, or is just tolerating me to see Leda.”

Cormoran rung off without making a sound. He couldn’t let on that he had overheard this undeniably private conversation. And he was a detective, used to creeping about people’s homes to find criminal evidence while they sat downstairs. He could find a bloody first aid kit. 

By the time he heard Robin’s key in the door an hour later, his resolve about keeping the phone call secret had weakened, replaced by a need to set things right between them. He nudged himself out from under Leda’s arm and left her watching a peskily colourful cartoon, meeting Robin outside and closing the door most of the way behind him, so that their voices wouldn’t carry, but they would be able to hear if Leda needed anything. 

She looked frightened. “I’m not going to yell at you, Robin,” he started, but it didn’t wipe the expression from her face.

“For the past six weeks you’ve been waiting for me to yell at you. I can tell when I open my mouth, or when I leave, that you’re tensing up in preparation for some kind of verbal abuse that you’re not going to get from me. Look, I hate the decision you made years ago. I’m not going to lie to you, there are very few things I wouldn’t trade to go back in time and set us straight.

“But you did it. And I see why, I _know,_ finally, that you thought it was for my benefit, not yours or hers. It was a sacrifice to you, and I’m willing to bet it was a difficult one. But I’m here now, and we need to be a team. It will only make it harder to make this work if you can’t let go of your mistakes. So… partners, yeah?”

He held his hand out to her and she shook it, somewhat tearily. Instead of the kiss he’d given her hand years before, he pulled her entire body into his chest and hugged her tightly.

“This is not what I expected,” she laughed sadly, almost in pity of herself. “Not in a million years, I was only hoping you wouldn’t get physical when you finally yelled. That was my best-case scenario.”

“Well, I had a lot of years to mature after you left. Fine wine, me.” He hoped she would laugh, and she did, blessedly less pitifully this time.

“Or a late bloomer.”

He hadn’t exactly intended for her laughter to be at his expense, but if it restored a sense of friendship between them, he was willing to take it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hehe, what's more unrealistic, that Cormoran enjoys PAW Patrol or that he has two weekend days off in a row? 😜 Once I had the idea for the commentary on PAW Patrol it was just far too amusing to take out, even though I know it's out of character.  
> Happy ending coming right up! Tomorrow morning probably; it's already written but I want to do a start-to-end reread to make sure it feels as fitting now as it did before I'd written half of the story.


	21. Falling Like the Stars

_And I'm not scared to say those words with you, I'm safe_

_We're fallin' like the stars, we're fallin' in love._

_\--- James Arthur, Falling Like the Stars_

It took months before either of them ever broached the subject of anything romantic, or even romance adjacent.

Cormoran had become enough of a fixture around their flat that they’d rigged up ropes on the ceiling of the guest room Switch had vacated so he could access the ensuite without reattaching his leg. He’d noted as well that the table and bookshelf from the foyer had been moved one Saturday into the hall, spaced just so that he could reach the kitchen, as well – at least, the nearest counter to the door, which was home to the kettle that always seemed to have been refilled during the night and a blue version of his office Cornwall mug that daily appeared, next to the filled kettle, with two teabags inside.

They hosted regularly, often Switch and Tiffany and Greg and Luce, who usually brought at least Jack and their Leda if not all of their children. Mysteriously, the choices Robin had made years before, which had for so long seemed the ruination of family unity, had brought the siblings together physically and emotionally.

They’d also finally re-established the long-forgotten curry nights with Nick and Ilsa, which were a much messier and more raucous affair with four children underfoot. Robin would have sworn years ago that this was the exact image of Cormoran’s worst nightmare, but he thrived in the environment.

The children, for some reason, loved his characteristically churlish nature and had adopted a game not unlike the one tourists played with the Palace Guards in their tall hats, trying to crack his grumpiest faces. As much as Robin chided him to play fair to the Herbert children, he couldn’t help that his Leda melted his heart and frown every time.

It was after one of these cheerful evenings, having cleaned the kitchen and dining table while Robin put their daughter to bed, that he determined to stake out the kitchen and catch her in the act of caring for him.

Just after ten she padded into the room, pyjama-clad with fuzzy socks and damp hair. She looked so beautiful, her fresh face taking him back to the morning after their very first date, and the pint he’d shared with Nick the next night and how he’d quite nearly gushed (yes, Cormoran Strike, gushing) about how blonde women had such translucent, ethereal eyelashes. He’d never noticed. It had felt magically intimate then, and did so again now, to see so closely a part of her she painted away for the outside world.

“I was beginning to think there was a tea fairy around here.”

She’d been humming softly and hadn’t noticed him it seemed, judging by her startled, but charming, jump-and-turn manoeuvre. She smiled at him and continued to pull his mug from the dishwasher he’d run and dry it.

“Trying to earn my keep around here somehow,” she joked playfully.

“It’s your flat, silly. You don’t have to wait on me hand and foot.”

She chose not to acknowledge the unspoken half of her earlier statement, opting for a practical commentary instead.

“Don’t think I haven’t noticed that my salary is higher than the last time I worked for you, by the precise amount Switch used to pay in rent.”

“Fuck, I knew I should’ve rounded up. You’re too smart for me, Ellacott.” He didn’t look disappointed, though his words may have suggested it.

She grinned, pulling out the box of tea, placing two bags in his mug, and filling the kettle. She hoped she was pulling off this charade of casualness. She and Strike didn’t often hang out like this, so friendly in the evenings. In fact, though increasingly playful of late, she had initially found their home life to be like a second, still impersonal, work life. Those fences had been torn down now, it seemed, and she felt just slightly like a dog who’d run too far from home and gotten lost.

“Your tea fairy hasn’t quite figured out how to make the milk accessible without it spoiling overnight.”

“That’s alright, I’ve mostly started taking it without. If I really want the treat, I’ll jump for it.”

“Jump for it! Cormoran, that’s dangerous!” she admonished. There must have been a two-metre gap between the counter and the frig with nothing in his reach for support, save for maybe the table if he reached far off to his left.

“You’ll hurt yourself,” she warned absently. “Could we maybe…?”

“No, I’d thought about it, but the frig can’t be moved. No plug closer, and no other water line access for the ice, either.”

“I suppose we could… Yeah, leave the kitchen chairs out in a row, like little islands! That’s it, and you can grab onto each on your way.”

He wanted to point out that he could alternatively just reattach his leg first thing in the morning for about the same amount of trouble as her creating a Hansel-and-Gretel-esque trail to the frig each night, but she looked so pleased at having solved the puzzle that he daren’t ruin it.

“But what if you get up in the night for a drink of water, forget, and smack into them?”

“I wouldn’t. Got a sink in my ensuite.” He was surprised and more than a little confused when her chuffed, problem-solving grin turned into the coy one he hadn’t seen in years.

“Want to see it?”

“Beg your pardon?”

She seemed to be taking a deep breath. “I said, want to see it? Don’t think you’ve been in my room before, we could…” She toyed with her fingers before looking determinedly into his eyes again. “We could take a bit of a scenic route.”

He was floored. “Are you propositioning me, Ellacott?”

She flushed red but smiled nervously.

“Depends. Are you accepting?”

He leaned back in his chair and grinned widely, openly. “Yeah. Reckon I am.”

She invaded his space then, grabbed his left hand in her right and brought it to her lips. “Right on then, Mr. Strike, I seem to recall we have a lot of catching up to do. Make love for lost time and all that.”

He wondered if he’d imagined the play on words in her last sentence, or whether it had been a Freudian slip. Deep down he also remembered the last time she called him Mr. Strike and resolved to replace those memories with this saucier edition.

He kissed her then, in a line down her symmetric face, forehead-nose-lips, and she realized with some astonishment that she’d forgotten what had been the most enthralling part of kissing him for the first time, many moons ago: he was a face-grabber. It had been a shock after Matthew, a tepid lover at best, to find that his hands framing either side of her jawline sent a wave right through her. It did the same now, and she moaned softly.

“Leda?” he asked as they reached the end of the hall.

“Sleeps like the dead. Always has, fortunately.” She locked the door behind them, then looked up at him, catching what she may have implied. “Not ‘fortunately,’ for this. It made it easier to get work done after bedtime, especially early on.”

Cormoran chuckled. “I got what you meant.” He gazed down at her, senselessly beautiful, and whispered a warning. “It’s been a while. Might not… last.”

She snorted, wondering vaguely what his definition of a “while” was. After nearly five years to herself, she’d confided to a laughing Vanessa one night that she was quite certain her hymen had grown back, and it would hurt like the first time whenever she got back in the saddle again. 

Surprisingly it didn’t, but then again, she hadn’t been imagining Cormoran when she’d vaguely envisioned getting “back in the saddle,” and he wouldn’t have hurt her.

Still more surprising was the fact that she had cried after, still sitting on Cormoran’s lap as he leaned back against her headboard, his cheek resting atop her head. And she was pretty sure her tears hadn’t managed to run down the back of her neck, but didn’t dare broach the subject, now, in the fragile afterglow.

“Alright, Ellacott?” he asked after some time.

“More than.” She punctuated the claim with a kiss to his hairy chest. “That was…”

“Phenomenal.”

“Precisely,” she agreed.

He traced his fingers on her shoulder where he’d left little marks the colour of strawberry fairy floss. “I didn’t think this was for me. Love. Not after Charlotte, not...” 

He looked off, hesitated, swallowed. She traced the path of his Adam’s apple with her thumbs. 

“Not after you.” He buried his head into the crook of her neck, shuddering. She wrapped her arms around him and pulled tight, so that he felt almost like he was being drawn into her but in a manner impossibly more intimate than the way they’d just shared. 

“God, Cormoran, I’m so sorry.” She kissed the top of his head, the hair she’d never been able to stop missing as Leda’s similarities meant she could never get enough distance to forget. 

“S’alright, now. Just for ages... I couldn’t see how we’d possibly gone so wrong.”

“You didn’t go wrong, at all. You deserved the world, and I took her from you.”

“I meant what I said.” He brushed her hair behind her left ear reassuringly. “It’s alright now, really.” After a long moment, he continued. “You told me, when I came here for the first time, that you could never ask me to forgive you. And you still haven’t, but regardless, I do.”

Her smile was radiant, reminiscent of a half-decade earlier when she’d said the words, her gaze and attention completely his, though she was not. “You do?”

“I do.” He thumbed her right hipbone. “Plus… we’re right good at that whole, ‘making love for lost time’ thing.”

Her answering grin, which was saved for him and whose mischievousness never faded in the many, many years that followed, told him it had not been a Freudian slip.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh my goodness, I can't believe this is over! This is actually the first multi-chapter fiction project I've finished that wasn't for a grade, and for years I've thought that finishing a story this long was simply something I couldn't do. (This does make me feel a bit bad to say now; was I stringing y'all along for the first bit if I didn't believe I'd finish?) But I fully attribute my ability to see this through to having such a wonderful and fulfilling fandom to write for and with! You all are absolutely wonderful and amazing and lovely. Thank you for every one of your comments and kudos along the way; they always brought a smile to my face. ❤️❤️❤️ I hope you've enjoyed the ride as much as I have!


End file.
